Driver training

Also from the archives - June 2004

For those of you overseas, some of the less gentle folk of the press ran some stories a while ago on the fact that Mark Latham has man boobs.

Today, I had a chance to visit his electorate, which is around the Campbelltown area. I was on my way to a driver training course at Oran Park, and had to stop off along the way for coffee and something to eat.

I took the Campbelltown exit off the M5 and thus began a fruitless search for something to eat and a cup of caffeine. Not that I would need caffeine, as I would find out later, but it is my morning habit to have some, so I was looking for it.

The centre of most urban areas is pretty easy to find – you just look for a main street lined with shops and things and chances are you’ll find a watering hole of some sort.

Not Campbelltown. The main drag has very little on it, but it is surrounded by what I might term “blobs” of fast food restaurants. I use “blobs” in the loosest possible way. The blob that I found had all 5 food groups – pizza, chicken, burgers, tacos and booze, all within an easy to wallow distance of each other.

No wonder the guy has man boobs.

I had a simple choice – go to Macca’s or keep searching and be late to my training course. Macca’s it was, and no coffee was to be found. (On a side note, I was rejoicing recently when I discovered that a McCafe is being opened at the McDonalds on the way to Goulburn. Drinkable coffee will be available south of Sydney).

The last time I was at Oran Park was many years ago when Hofman enticed me onto an anthropological expedition to the GAFA to study Truck Racing. Very little had changed in the intervening years – Oran Park is still a long way from anywhere, and visitors are advised to wind up the windows and turn up the stereo and to blast through the surrounding suburbs without stopping. It is truly the land of Ugg Boots and VN Commodores with stickers on the back proclaiming things like, “I’m bad”.

There were 22 of us on the course – me and 3 of my staff and a wide cross section of private and corporate types. There were two sales reps from Tip Top bakeries, a P-Plater in an old BMW that was clearly being paid for by a concerned Dad, two early 20’s sisters in two very beaten up cars also being paid for by Dad and a then a swag of company vehicles – Peugeots, Commodores and three Falcon wagons, plus a Jeep, a Land Cruiser and my Disco.

One thing became apparent very quickly – the 5 or so Asians on the course were bloody hopeless drivers. No matter what exercise we were put through, they were the worst. The driver of the biggest tank, the Land Cruiser, turned out to be a tiny Asian woman who had a bad habit of tail gating other people (like me) and pranging cars (thankfully that didn’t happen today). No wonder she was in a Cruiser – if you could buy Abrahms tanks, she’d be driving one. She was nervous and fretful and clearly got her licence out of a Weeties packet.

We went through the standard exercises – hooning down a straight and then braking at a set of cones and seeing how long it took to stop in the dry. Everyone was amazed when the Disco pulled up in the top half off the pack and only took six inches longer to stop than an MX-5. I simply shrugged my shoulders and muttered “ABS”. The main reason was that I am not afraid to jam on the brakes. If you have ABS, my philosophy is that you might as well use it. It’s not much good if it doesn’t kick in. Everyone else was doing “Gucci” braking, where they gently massaged the pedal and were afraid of a few skid marks and a bit of tyre smoke.

The best of the pack was a little road rocket of a Peugeot. No matter what we did, that thing stuck to the ground like a very sticky skateboard. The worst were the cars driven by the sisters – they were an old Mercedes and an old Subaru. Both had rooted shocks and worse drivers and they tended to skate off the road regardless of the conditions. It showed up really clearly what you get when you buy a good new European car – braking and handling performance. It was no surprise that a fairly new Hyundai sedan was a pile of poo. It had the suspension dynamics of a drunken hippo. The driver was terrified of taking it over 60 km/h, which was a bit silly as we were there to fling the cars around to see what they would do. I guess he had come unstuck in it previously and wasn’t keen to make a fragile tin can go that fast.

After the dry, straight braking, we did straight wet braking. The idea was to come down the straight at 60 km/h hit the cones and brake, then 70km/h, then 80km/h etc all the way up to 100 km/h if you reckoned your car could pull up before sliding off the skid pan and into the bush. We didn’t have a radar gun, but it was crystal clear that there were plenty of pussies on our course. My blokes from work took their Falcon wagons out and fanged them mercilessly – I can now see why I have to sign insurance claims every month. However, they took the wagons out to the edge and over and then back again. Amazingly, the old Falcoon was one of the best handling vehicles on the day. They were pushed very hard and they hung on really well. Never again will I knock the Falcoon.

After the straight, wet braking, we went on to braking and turning in the wet. If you’ve done a driver training course, you’ve probably been through the setup where you go down a lane of cones and then have to swerve either left or right around an obstacle and brake at the same time and stay on the road. The cars without ABS tended to lock up and skid and go sideways through the cones, but I managed to get through the day without squashing any of them. I found that exercise a complete buzz – it was such a rush. You’re hooning at this line of cones at up to 100km/h (if you have the nerve) and a bloke is standing behind the obstacle with a flag. When you hit the line of cones, you slam on the anchors and he drops the flag left or right, and that is the direction that you swerve in. It was bloody terrifying! I can’t explain why – you’d have to do it. Everyone finished that exercise with a bad case of the shakes. The gutless ones would toodle down the track at about 70km/h and brake before the cones – the instructor had a lot of fun yelling at them to go faster and to stop being such morons. They pulled up early and rarely took out any cones, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to experience what the car does when it loses it, and to learn how to control it.

I gave the watching students many demonstrations of the “Disco waddle”, which is what happens when you push the brake all the way to the floor and the ABS kicks in and two tonnes of metal, with a high centre of gravity, then starts to work out how to slow down on a wet and variable road surface. Each wheel was braking at its own speed, and the Disco therefore had a tendency to try to jump in four directions at once. It looked ungainly, but I zipped around those cones with no problems and pulled up pretty easily. It was clearly more worrying for other drivers – the Land Cruiser driver was in tears after each run through that exercise. You could see the fear very clearly on the faces of the drivers as they roared up to the cones. Most wimped out and braked early. For those of you that have skied with Jane, let me say no more.

The last exercise was taking a long, sweeping left hander in the wet and having to brake at the end to avoid a fallen “tree”. Unlike normal driving, we’d roar into the corner as fast as possible, the instructor would blow a whistle when we were halfway round, and we’d have to brake and avoid the “tree” at the end of the corner. The Peugeot went around like it was on rails. The Subaru, Mercedes and old BMW all ended up facing backwards. The Disco made it around at 80km/h, but the instructors told me that if I had gone just a bit faster, I probably would have rolled. They had told all the sedan drivers to push it up past 75km/h, but neglected to tell me to keep it at about 75km/h. They stood there open mouthed as I barreled around the corner with the car lurching this way and that and the passenger side wheels about to leave the ground. I think it has been a long time since a student rolled a vehicle, and they were a bit concerned about how close I’d come. It was normal to see the sedans going around with the rear passenger wheel completely off the ground, but they just tended to spin. Disco’s have a bad habit of flipping when doing that kind of thing.

I guess they had spent the whole day trying to gee these wimps into pushing it a bit harder, and they forgot that they didn’t have to tell all of us to speed up. Yes, it was the equivalent of me doing the Dead Cow on the slopes.

My advice – if your company won’t send you, invest $246 of your own money and go.