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Bondurant Executive Protection Driving School

Learning how to get away from the bad guys

Say you're based, doing business or vacationing in a potentially dangerous place, a place where people sometimes get killed or kidnapped. What will you do if the bad guys come after you on the road? As a minimum, you (or your driver) had better know how to hit the gas and haul tail away, quickly and safely. Beyond that, there are techniques that most can master.

These are taught at a small number of anti-terrorist, anti-kidnapping driving schools in the U.S. and elsewhere. One, the Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving near Phoenix, AZ (www.bondurant.com), has offered an excellent Executive Protection driving course (plus a wide variety of other advanced driving and racing courses) for many years. Not surprisingly, demand for it has increased in recent years.

Basic Training

We signed up and completed this course and came away impressed and equipped with some potentially life-saving driving and escape techniques. And we had a ball in the process.

All courses begin with the basics: proper braking, steering, shifting; smoothness and awareness; vehicle weight transfer; skid control; and thinking and looking well ahead—not where you are or where your car's heading in a skid, for example, but where you want to go.

Instructor Will Parker assigned us each a bright orange Mustang GT, which we used for basic and advanced training: lapping an oval to practice cornering "lines," "trail braking" (extending braking into corners to keep the front tires weighted for better traction), steering during emergency braking (Bondurant says "ABS" stands for the "Ability to Brake and Steer," which enables staying hard on the brakes and letting the system do the "pumping" while steering around an obstacle), and high-speed lapping on a multi-turn road-racing track.

Simulation Manuevers

Especially important are "Accident Simulator" and "skid car" training. The former is a coned-off "three-lane highway" with green lights over each lane. As you approach, an instructor suddenly switches two of the three lights to red to simulate lanes blocked by an accident just ahead. The trick: "lift, turn, squeeze"—lift off the gas, turn quickly into the open lane, then straighten the car and squeeze back on the gas to stabilize it. This teaches the accident-avoidance habit of finding an opening and going for it when something happens ahead, instead of the more common reaction of jamming on the brakes and sliding into it.

The skid cars ride on outriggers that can hydraulically lift their front or rear wheels to reduce traction, slightly or completely, to simulate slick conditions. You drive a figure eight while the instructor plays with traction and your mind to teach essential skid-control techniques. When the front loses traction (understeer), and the car won't turn, just lift off the gas, wait for steering traction to return, then steer where you want to go. When the rear breaks loose (oversteer), quickly "countersteer" (the way the rear is going) to catch it, then quickly back to prevent a skid the other way. In any skid recovery, it's extremely important to always look exactly where you want to go and let peripheral vision take care of what's around you.

Reverse 180s

On day one, Will had us practicing forward and reverse 180s in retired Ford police cruisers. At 30-40 mph, it's surprisingly easy to jam on the parking brake, locking up the rear wheels, then turn one way or the other to spin the car around in the width of the road, release the brake to catch the slide and accelerate away in the other direction. From a stop, you can throw it into reverse, stand on the gas, then lift, crank the wheel right or left, shift back into drive on the way around and drive away as soon you're pointed the way you want to go.

Take-Outs

Day two, we practiced "take-outs" in really old retired police cars fortified with steel bars. The bad-guy car pulls alongside to shoot or force you over. You nudge into its rear fender, then steer into it and accelerate to spin it around. With practice, it works wonderfully well—it's in the ditch or off the cliff and you're down the road with minimal damage.

When you need to crash through a roadblock, the trick is to slow on approach (the bad guys think you're stopping), then accelerate into one blocking car just behind its rear wheel (the light end of a front-engine vehicle), which spins it out of the way without major damage to your car. Hit it too fast, or on the heavy (engine) end, though, and you'll end up not far down the road with your radiator smashed. For practice, they dragged out two junkers for us to ram one with the other, once in back and again in front to demonstrate the difference.

Autocross Escapes

Day three found us doing timed autocross (parking-lot cone course) runs, then lapping a larger, faster oval and hot-lapping the full road course, all in the Mustangs. Is this relevant to anti-terrorist driving? Absolutely, because the better your experience, skills and control, the faster you can safely drive on twisty roads, the better your chances of escaping less-skilled pursuers. We also do more skid-car work and more front- and rear-180s.

Real-Life Scenarios

Day four, Will turned us loose on the road course in the police sedans to drive as fast as we could in the opposite direction, simulating fast driving on unfamiliar roads. Then he and another instructor set up terrorist scenarios on the larger oval. The bad-guy car would approach from ahead or behind, sometimes suddenly blocking the road, and we had to make a quick decision and execute the best escape technique (brake, accelerate, do a 180) short of ramming or taking it out.

As an inexperienced but overconfident kid with good judgment and car control but no training, I used to regularly and foolishly challenge the limits of control. I was lucky to survive my youthful mistakes, but too many do not. For that reason, I strongly recommend skid control and accident avoidance training as a minimum of for all drivers, from beginners to veterans.

Resource

Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving; 1-800-842-7223; www.bondurant.com