Offensive Driving Lessons: More Fun, More Punch, More Crunch

Illustration: Cristian Turdera

Mashing the accelerator, I goose my Mercury Grand Marquis up to 30 miles per hour, closing fast on a Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor. The Crown Vic is crossing an abandoned airstrip at the Quonset State Airport in Rhode Island. I've been preparing for this moment for days and suddenly feel a sense of transcendence. I knowwithout looking how fast I'm going. My shoulders are back against the seat, elbows crooked, hands at 9 and 3.

Riding shotgun is Anthony Ricci, owner of Advanced Driving & Security. Ricci teaches evasive driving techniques to SWAT teams, Fortune 500 security firms, and private contractors bound for Iraq. He's giving me the short course: navigating cone slaloms, slamming on the brakes at freeway speeds, executing neck-snapping J-turns (spinning a car 180 degrees and reversing course within a single lane). Such skills could help me flee, say, an ambush in an alley. And that's all well and good. But I don't want to just escape. I want to learn how to use a car to kick ass. At a meeting this morning, Ricci bashed toy cars together to illustrate how to get Newtonian on the bad guys. "This person has come up to kill you," he said in a thick Rhode Island accent. "You are gonna fuck this motherfucker up."

First, a little physics lesson. Accelerate a car's mass enough and turning the wheel won't alter its forward inertia. Basically, if you go too fast and turn too hard, the tires lose adhesion, causing the car to skid. Gearheads call it understeer. And it's why I blasted most of the cones in a 60-foot slalom at 45 miles per hour.

Wired’s Ben Paynter learns how to drive like the Secret Service. The training school teaches drivers how to make J-turns away from shoulder-launched missiles and ram into bad guys. Definitely more fun than driver's ed.

Video produced by Annaliza Savage and edited by Michael Lennon.
For more, visit video.wired.com.

Now, if I want to induce that effect in another car, I have to clip my opponent's rear bumper or his fender right near the taillight. Getting overeager and bonking the door or even too far up the fender will induce what Ricci calls "crush-kill-destroy" mode, T-boning the car. The subtler version, called the PIT maneuver, or "precision immobilization technique," is a staple of police porn. It involves knocking your quarry's rear end off balance to send him fishtailing off the road, ideally facing the wrong direction.

I accelerate nervously toward my target. Ricci's last words of advice are more Zen than scientific: "Hit him in one smooth motion. It's all finesse." I pull along the passenger side of the Vic and wait until my front bumper is just past his taillight. Then I turn my steering wheel to the left until I feel the dull thud of contact with his fender. I keep turning against the pressure. In one squealing motion, the Vic spins back toward me, then whizzes across my path as if I've blown through an intersection against the light. It misses my front bumper by inches and makes a full rotation in the rearview. Me? I'm fine.

For my final exam, Ricci positions the mangled Vic behind a beat-up Chevy Lumina, forming a roadblock roughly 15 feet in front of me. Then he tells me to plow through it. The cars are parked end-to-end, their bumpers nearly touching; I don't see how I can break through. Then, suddenly, the answer unfolds in front of me. The Lumina touches the ground in only four places. If I hit the car on the rear bumper, it will pivot on the front wheel. And the Lumina's trunk will be far more forgiving than the Vic's engine block. I point my driver-side headlight toward the Lumina's axle, grit my teeth, floor it, and bam! The roadblock swings open like a hinged door. The Lumina skitters across the pavement.

I emerge from the wreckage towing the Chevy's bumper, honking wildly. Ricci gives me a stoic thumbs-up.

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