Opinion: You’re never too old to improve your driving skills

On the 4th January 1961, a Boeing B-52 Stratofortress broke up over Goldsboro, North Carolina. As the aircraft gyrated to the cotton fields below, it ejected two fairly fundamental items of hold luggage, namely a pair of Mark 39 thermonuclear bombs. Each had 250 times the destructive power of the device that levelled Hiroshima or, to put it another way, more than the cumulative total of every bomb dropped in the history of aerial warfare.

Opinions vary as to how close Goldsboro came to being substantially remodelled. One of the devices hit the ground at speed, the warhead burying itself nearly 60 metres into the earth. The other had gone through three of its four stages to detonation, its deployed parachute catching it neatly in a tree.

What five of the eight crew members who survived by ejecting or bailing out must have felt as they floated towards a possible nuclear conflagration is hard to imagine. Probably pondering how they managed to get into that situation.

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As drivers we don’t always have time to ponder the consequences of our errors, at least not before the fact. In 35 years of driving, I’ve yet to have a really big accident, certainly not anything hard enough to deploy an airbag, but even the other incidents are frequently mentally replayed. I’m not sure if you’re the same, but I beat myself up over things that happened decades ago, in a bid to learn lessons from those mishaps of the past.

If I’m brutally honest, most of them came back to one thing: illusory superiority. I thought I was a lot better at driving than I actually was. Call it the folly of youth if you will, but in every indiscretion I experienced, I was feeling pretty godlike right up until that moment I wasn’t. I can thank one man for knocking that out of me: Matt Becker, the man responsible for how modern Lotuses, Aston Martins and, soon, McLarens drive.

Sitting alongside Becker at a number of race tracks demonstrated how little I knew. Yes, I could pedal around the circuit at an okay clip, but unlike Mr Becker, I didn’t have plans B, C and D in my locker to execute if plan A went awry. I realised I was operating on bravado and a certain lack of imagination rather than a reliable skillset.

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Matt Becker - Vehicle Engineering Director

Since those days I’ve tried to become a better driver. I’ve come to recognise that dangerously giddy feeling when you feel you can do no wrong behind the wheel. I’ve worked on my technique. I’ve learned like a sponge through many years spent circuit driving and always tried to jump in next to people who are better than me. I’m a good way from infallible, but I like to think I’ve reduced my odds of stuffing things up.

I still go to track days and recognise people who are the image of old me. I sat next to one once at Spa in a Porsche Carrera GT, and witnessed the panic and recrimination on his face as he ploughed into the gravel trap at Pouhon. As the guardrail loomed, for a moment he was that guy parachuting down onto Goldsboro, wondering where it had all gone wrong.

You’re never too old to keep improving your skills. Or, as my dad once wearily told me after another teenage tale of automotive woe, “It’s what you learn after you think you know it all that counts.”

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