As far as there is no explicit emergency concerned, driving without a certain safety reserve on public roads is something stupid. Even then, in case of an emergency, attention and measure to what you at the wheel do must be an absolute priority.
The daily drives, also, must not degenerate in quests for adrenaline – that’s not their point. How about the pleasure and satisfaction driving an automobile may generate? Some cars feature a so-called Sport mode. So, what’s that for? Driving a bit faster and sharper than normally shouldn’t imply any serious risk. Especially if the road is free of traffic.
So, that’s how you may get an idea about what a car may hold in terms of dynamic potential, engine sound and, generally, feedback for the driver. Keeping decent manners and a certain level of care should be part of a default behavior when driving on a public road.
Extreme driving should be tried only in proper conditions (speed circuit, proving ground, isolated zone, etc.), assuming you can’t hurt anyone but yourself, as a consequence of your own choice to take risks or to exceed whatever you have done before.
I proudly got my Private Pilot License in the US more than a couple of decades ago and I noticed the sentence written on its verso: “safety is not an accident, it must be planned”. Obviously, these words are relevant for anything else, not only for flying. Also driving fits well to their message. Agree, things are far less complicated when it comes to take the wheel of an automobile instead of taking the stick/yoke of an airplane, but keeping a high level of awareness and paying attention to what you are about to do during your drive should always be on your mind.
While reading, you may think – “OK, this guy says nice things, yet how seriously should I take this? Anyone can put together some more or less wise words to impress the audience. Is there a real experience behind what he tells or is this just another safety-oriented theory text?” Actually, there is an unpleasant experience behind this text.
At a certain moment during my automotive journalist career, one winter I was returning from a tour with a long-term test car, the quite ordinary kind of – it was a Peugeot 206 1.4. And here are the circumstances that led to the disaster: insisting to go as fast as possible after leaving behind a busy road section (yep, just call it gratuitous speeding), I met uneven fog conditions. Also, feeling tempted to increase speed, I overrated my knowledge of the road segment. As I was driving downhill, the curves were becoming shallower – it seemed like I can push harder. When I reached a lower altitude, nearing the bottom of the valley, fog became thicker and temperature dropped (as I noticed watching the simple digital thermometer on the dashboard).
What I treated too easily: just before nearing the course of a river, the road took another last tight curve. So, suddenly, I found myself “sorti dans le décor”, as they say in France. The fog prevented me to properly see the road, the wind, plus humidity, plus low temperature generated icy conditions on the tarmac and (worst of all) I was intentionally faster than the common sense would have recommended. After a brief understeer phase, I found myself out in the ditch, car totaled, me unharmed physically. Mentally, this remained a radical turning point in my life.
Trick of the destiny: for the next day, there was a filming session scheduled for me with a Saab 9-3 2.0 Turbo XWD around the same place, but in daylight conditions. Since the job was implying many other people and a TV show, I could not afford to skip it. How does it feel to have to put yourself at the wheel of a quite performant car after you just stupidly crashed an elementary thing? I wish you to never find out.
Of course, in order to shoot some convincing scenes, the producer of the show yelled a lot at me: “Come on, do you call this a fast pass? Are you awake? Are you done with inspecting the road? Is this car defective, or what?” Truly, the only defective thing there and then, it was me. And I had to put myself back together without delay, since my professional life and reputation were in jeopardy. Again, I wish you to never find out what something like this feels. In order to avoid or properly solve any potential problems on your own way, reading again, from the beginning, it might be helpful.
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