how to drive ben collins.pdf

(410 KB) Pobierz
HOW
TO DRIVE
THE ULTIMATE GUIDE – FROM THE MAN WHO WAS THE STIG
BEN COLLINS
3
Contents
Prologue:
How Not To Drive ................................................... 6
Introduction:
How to Drive .......................................................... 8
Part 1: A Very Short History of Driving
Roads Aren’t Straightforward............................... 14
Burning Rubber ................................................... 16
Road Rage .......................................................... 18
The Driving Test ................................................... 21
King of the Road .................................................. 24
Part 2: The Basics
Are You Sitting Comfortably? ............................... 28
The Beast ............................................................ 36
Smooth Operator ................................................. 46
Changing Gear .................................................... 50
Steering............................................................... 60
Braking................................................................ 65
Cornering ............................................................ 91
Epilogue:
Drifting through London ..................................... 266
Index ................................................................. 270
Credits .............................................................. 272
Part 3: The Open Road
Avoiding Accidents ............................................ 116
Junctions .......................................................... 128
Overtaking......................................................... 135
Dual Carriageways ............................................ 150
Motorways ........................................................ 152
In the Zone ........................................................ 169
Free Your Mind .................................................. 174
Vision ................................................................ 180
Night Driving ..................................................... 186
Basic Instinct ..................................................... 190
Visualization ...................................................... 195
Part 4: Skidding
The Limits of Grip .............................................. 200
Driving in the Wet ............................................... 209
Winter Driving .................................................... 220
Worst-case Scenarios ....................................... 232
Stunt Driving ..................................................... 240
0.1
Prologue:
How Not to Drive
1998. A twisting country lane in the middle of
nowhere, travelling at 80 miles per hour.
The sound of 14 tons of metal colliding is almost deafening when you’re right next
to it. Imagine 100 heavy doors slamming in unison and you’re not even close. It’s
loud enough to summon people from farmhouses half a mile away to search for
plane wreckage, but inside the crash … you hardly hear a thing.
That’s because your brain is moving – and as it thumps the inside of your
skull it disrupts the electrical activity powering things like sight and hearing.
My Toyota Supra cornered like it was on rails. It sat on enormous wide tyres
and had a whale-tail wing with enough downforce to leave a dent in the floor. At
the time I was a Formula 1 hopeful and one of the fastest men in Formula 3 – even
Sir Jackie Stewart said so, and boy did I know it.
I was
so
clever and knew my local roads
so
well that I had a braking plan for
every conceivable scenario. One flowing section in particular had a bottleneck into
a single-track lane with no passing space. I calculated my velocity precisely to be
able to make it all the way through it and out the other side before an approaching
car filled the gap, or if there was a car coming through I would throw the anchors
to buy enough time for it to emerge.
According to a recent insurance survey there are certain types of music
Prologue
‘Inside the
crash you
hardly hear
a thing.’
that make you put your foot down and generally drive like a complete moron.
The Black Eyed Peas topped this deadly driving chart with ‘Hey Mama’, a
banging tune there’s no doubt, but at the time I had the Beastie Boys busting
decibels.
I wanged the stereo up a notch and tipped into the familiar dusty right-hander
towards the mouth of the funnel at full speed. Over the course of the next second
the vanishing point ran into a scene that I hadn’t budgeted for.
Thick mud was spread lavishly across the road. Alarm bells were ringing, but
the mud was quickly replaced by a more pressing issue. A very large, slow-moving
6
‘Time
slowed
down, but
the car
didn’t.’
truck was lumbering through the bottleneck, too slowly to clear it at my rate of
closure.
Time slowed down, but the car didn’t.
I braked. Wide tyres and downforce were powerless on the greasy mud, and
my front tyres locked instantly. The trajectory involved a double whammy of hedge
and a lethal side impact with the truck.
Think fast.
0.25 seconds later I released the useless brakes, hoping to recover enough
steering to swing across the front of the truck and punch through the gateway into
a field.
Nope.
The mouth-like radiator grill and the word
VOLVO
filled the screen.
Then it was that big moment. There were no more choices, only
consequences. I could have been an accountant. I could have been a yoga
teacher. But there I was with no more tricks up my sleeve. It was time to take the
hit, and I had no airbag.
I closed my eyes as the hood of the Supra exploded into the truck’s bumper
and deformed until it met with the Volvo’s front axle, which didn’t bend much.
The Supra’s engine and gearbox travelled 2 feet my way as the physics of
displacement and momentum did their thing. Stopping a 12-ton truck, fully laden
with turf, dead in its tracks put a force of deceleration through my body in excess
of sixty times the force of gravity. I did not feel well.
The head-on impact and abrupt stop rearranged all sorts of things inside
the Supra, including my kidneys, which ruptured and bled for several days. Pens,
loose change and a half-eaten sandwich from the previous owner all relocated
themselves to the dashboard.
Temperament has always been a problem for me, and although I’ve learned
to control it I know that there are demons lurking. The track offers me a positive
outlet for unleashing that side of my personality in very controlled bursts. But there
are certain things I can’t combine with driving, and loud music is one of them.
7
How Not to Drive
Introduction
0.2
Introduction:
How to Drive
Driving is one of the most pleasurable things
that each of us does on a daily basis.
It is also the most dangerous. And it doesn’t matter whether you drive on the right
or the left, using an automatic gearbox or a stick – the fundamental principles and
physics of driving are the same everywhere.
The world population of motor vehicles exceeded 1 billion a couple of years
ago. Car crashes kill 50 per cent more people than malaria, and the World Health
Organization predicts that road deaths will rise 52 per cent by 2030, overtaking
HIV AIDS as a global killer within the decade.
Perhaps that isn’t so surprising. Whichever country you’re from, you want
to go from being a learner to a driver as fast as possible. Having tackled a tough
multiple-choice questionnaire, reversed round a corner and successfully navigated
a supermarket car park, you tear off your L-plates or probationary stickers, and
take a ton of speeding metal out onto the open road. Millions of drivers will receive
their licences this year with less than eighteen hours’ driving experience under
their belt.
A Starbucks barista receives twenty-four hours of training before being
handed the keys to an espresso machine.
The robotic syllabus of the driving test itself remains painfully inadequate –
not so much in what it contains as how much is left out: controlling a skid,
driving on a motorway, tackling a corner, driving at night and overtaking … to
name but a few. And of those who pass, less than 1 per cent receives further
training.
Governments, road safety groups, even the Green lobby want to wrap us
in cotton wool and then pull it over our eyes. They would have us believe that
speeding, among other things, is the biggest danger facing modern drivers,
but 700,000 police road accident reports gathered over the last five years tell a
different story. The real killer is simply poor driving.
8

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika:

Zgłoś jeśli naruszono regulamin