SecurityDriver News

Depending on your occupation, there is no doubt there are scenarios where one may need to drive fast. The difficulty associated with driving fast depends on three issues, the skill of the driver, the vehicle they are driving and the environment they are driving through. On an ice covered road 30 MPH can be exciting, on a four lane highway with the sun shining, 80 MPH could go unnoticed. In a three vehicle motorcade, the driver of the lead vehicle may not think 70 MPH is a problem, but the driver of the third vehicle may disagree with that assessment.

Driving fast is a complicated issue. Let’s be clear that driving fast in a straight line is not difficult, unless you are sitting in a Dragster that consists of a metal tube with a 6000 HP engine behind you, and you are planning on going 300 MPH in a quarter mile. Driving fast becomes difficult when you need to operate one of the other controls (brake – steering) of the vehicle. In a non racing scenario it makes little difference how fast you’re traveling in a straight line, the skill (and excitement) comes in when you need to do something with the car, like driving around a corner or making an avoidance maneuver, at that point it becomes not an exercise in high speed straight line driving, but an exercises in high speed braking or turning. All this requires training and practice, and there is an enormous difference between driving around a corner fast, and driving out of an emergency.

SOME BASIC THOUGHTS ON DRIVING FAST

As speed increases, drivers’ eye tends to focus on objects just a short distance in front of the car’s hood. Common sense says that the faster you drive the further ahead of the car your attention should be focused. In a high risk environment you need the eyes of everyone in the vehicle coupled with a method of communicating what they see to the driver, or drivers, this requires training and practice.

The faster you drive, the more often you should consult your speedometer. You cannot rely on your own judgment; the faster you drive, the more your perception of speed becomes distorted.

Don’t drive faster than you can see. If you are driving at 60 MPH you are moving approximately 90 Feet a Second, most researchers say that you need 2.5 seconds to react to what you see, that means at 60 mph you would need 225 feet to react to what is happening. It is my opinion that training considerably cuts down those 2.5 seconds.This is the most important issue and training point – When you increase speed, you are suddenly driving a very different car from the one you were in control of a few moments ago. If you double your speed from 40 mph to 80 mph, the forces acting on the vehicle, has been increased by a factor of four. Turning the steering wheel at 80 mph will put four times as much stress on the car as the same maneuver at 40 mph. And no matter what braking method you use, it will take you four times longer to stop the vehicle.

 It may be difficult to think of a 10,000 lb armored Suburban as “sensitive”, but a car’s controls are extremely sensitive to speed, the faster you go, the more sensitive the vehicles braking and steering become. Small changes in speed (as little as 2 MPH) will dramatically change the vehicles response to the drivers input. Controlling a vehicle while driving into a corner or through an emergency maneuver is a skill that needs to be learned, practiced, and measured.

To give an example of how sensitive vehicles are to speed; A competent driver can drive through our slalom exercise at 30 MPH with little or no problems; at 32 life will start to become exciting; at 35, doable but very exciting; at 37.5 the car will be sliding, but again doable; at 40 MPH the driver will not be able to complete the exercise. A change of about 2 MPH will be the difference between successes and failure. How this translates to the real world is that you can be driving 100 MPH in a straight line (easy to teach, it’s the pedal on the right – press on it) but if you need to make an emergency maneuver or drive around a corner you will have to slow the car down from 100 MPH to a speed that the driver – vehicle – environment can handle, and that is not easy to teach or master.