A few of our local old-Volvo types and I recently had a great time taking a high-performance driving course. This was one of the "bring your own car and helmet, and we'll provide the instructor and the track" sort of deals, and $125 got us four hours of classroom instruction (a.k.a. Ground School) and a full day running around Portland International Raceway on a very wet track in the rain.

My instructor and I got on perfectly, the 1800S behaved itself, and I came away with a much better defined notion of high-performance driving than I had going in. Slippery conditions are a great asset to learning. The resulting lower speeds give you more time to think ahead and plan your next move, and if you don't get something just right, you'll find it out pretty quickly. I still have mud on the car to prove it.

Even if you have no intentions of going racing, all the car control skills apply to safe driving on the street at regular speeds. You'll become a safer and more confident driver. Here's what I came away with:

Tires can only give 100% traction, no more
High-performance driving is largely about keeping the tires right at that 100% as much of the time as possible. If you do something that asks for 101% traction, the car will not go where you intend, so don't ask. If you're getting by with 90% traction, you're not going as fast as you could be. Seems obvious, doesn't it?

You want to keep accelerating and/or going fast as long as possible on straights, so that means you have to brake as late as possible for the turns. Accordingly, you'll have to brake as hard as possible and devote 100% of traction for braking. This leaves 0% traction available for steering, so you need to get all your braking done while you're still going in a straight line. I've heard would-be racers say, "Yeah, I'm getting it now and braking deeper into the turns." Doesn't work for me.

The quick way around a track is to exit the turns moving as fast as possible, so you'll need to accelerate through the turns. Fortunately, old Volvos are rear wheel drive cars, so the tires that are doing the accelerating are not the same ones that are doing the steering. You want to use 100% of traction from both ends of the car, but that doesn't mean going to full throttle the instant you turn -- those rear wheels are devoting a lot of their traction to keeping the car from sliding off the road sideways. You do want to apply as much power as you can, and as quickly as you can, after starting the turn, which means balancing the accelerating and lateral loads on the driven tires.

Smooth is where it's at
Rather than going into some cerebral explanation about weight transfer, polar moment and stuff like that, I'll just put it this way: you've got the car right on the thin edge of losing control, using all traction available for braking, steering, or accelerating. What's happens if you jerk it around on top of that? Driving violently does not make you go around a track fast. It makes you not go around at all (the car will go around all right, just not around the track).

You want to do everything as quickly as possible, but always very smoothly. If you don't understand this intuitively, there's no point in explaining it. Let someone else drive if you must travel on the freeway.

A clutch is not a brake
So, you need to brake really hard, downshift at least once so you'll be ready to accelerate, you can't jerk the car, and you have three pedals to work with only two feet. Switching your foot from brake to accelerator to downshift isn't going to cut it. You can't slip the clutch to bring the RPM up to speed either -- not only will you lock up the rear wheels (tires already at 100%, remember), you'll burn up the clutch in no time. You must be able to "heel and toe" -- that is, work the brake and accelerator pedals simultaneously with one foot.

That may sound daunting, but it's actually very easy to do with a little practice. The details depend on your car and how the pedals are situated relative to one another. You may want to work the gas with your heel and the brake with your toe, or vice versa. Whatever works is fair, but failing to do it is not an option. (Do not try this while wearing large hiking boots.)

You have to feel it
In a turn, even at low speeds, no part of the car is moving in the direction in which the tires are rolling. "What!" you say? It's true -- there is always some "slip angle" involved for each tire, and the closer you get to that 100% traction point, the greater those angles get. If you're receptive to it, the car will communicate everything you need to know about this through your pants, the steering wheel and the pedals -- the seat twitching around under you is the car talking. Learn to understand what it's telling you. The more you're able to feel what's going on, the more time you'll be able to spend at the traction limit and the faster you'll go around the track.

So RELAX! If your arm and leg muscles are knotted up and bulging, and your nether regions are puckered from the strain, you can't feel much else. You have nothing to fear but fear itself.

The less you steer, the faster you go
Stirling Moss on the art of driving through turns: "It is better to go in slow and come out fast than to go in fast and come out dead."

Odds are that you've heard quite a bit about apexes and lines through corners and such things. So, you're going to start the turn from one edge of the track, steer towards wherever you guess the apex might be, and then ease up on the wheel so you go back to the outside edge again, right? Not.

You do, ideally, want to begin and end at the one edge and just clip the other edge someplace in between, but after you turn the wheel once, you don't want to move it again until you finally exit the corner. The whole point of the lines thing is to minimize steering, so all the available traction can go to keeping the car from sliding sideways off the track while accelerating.

Three major factors make this possible: 1) correct entry speed, 2) turning the correct amount at the correct time, and 3) as much acceleration as the first two factors permit. Get these right and you will hit the apex (wherever that happens to be; it's not like it's officially marked with a big day-glo "A") and track out of the turn going like a land jet on afterburner. The car will have made an arc of the largest possible constant radius in doing so, and that's the quick route to take. If you have to adjust the steering in the middle, you've gotten at least one of those three factors wrong (most people instinctively want to turn too early, for a start).

Racetracks are not necessarily designed to make this easy, there's traffic to pass or to fend off, and a dozen other things may prevent you from taking the ideal line through every turn, but the principle remains unchanged: however you manage it, the line that makes you turn the wheel the least is the good one for whatever situation you're dealing with.

Look where you want to go
Every fall when the first icy patches form on the roads and rush hour turns into a bumper cars contest, one of our local TV stations trots out their Traffic Safety Expert. He covers the usual "don't lock the brakes" and "drive smoothly" bits (many people don't follow this sound advice) and then says, "If you look at something you're afraid you're going to hit, you probably will. Look at where you want to go, and you'll go there."

As driving techniques become intuitive, you'll find this works amazingly well at speed. You can look clear across to the exit of a turn when going in (or at some landmark along the way if you can't see the exit) and the good line magically comes together. The guy spinning across the track in front of you gets taken in almost peripherally -- if you don't actually have to alter course, don't shift your focus. Don't follow the car in front of you (!), just pick up your next landmark as early as you can and drive your own line.

That may sound weird to you, but once you can do this consistently, you'll know you've gotten a good part of the trick of going fast. The analytical part of your mind can then devote itself to thinking about what you're going to do better on the next lap, how to sucker that car in front of you into letting you by, and whatever else you need to think about to go around the course just a little more quickly.

In adversity, don't quit driving
Instructors love to tell Student From Hell stories. My favorite was about the guy in a big Porsche who, having gotten in over his head, simply let go of the steering wheel and threw up his hands. After the resulting dust settled, the instructor asked his student exactly what motivated him to do such a deed. Turns out the guy had read in a club magazine that Porsches are so well engineered that they steer themselves out of trouble. All the instructor found to say to this was, "Hail Stuttgart!"

If you're going to go fast, you will depart from your chosen path from time to time. There's a patch of oil on the track, the car breaks, or you just plain screw up -- whatever it is, you will occasionally get into a situation where nothing you can do will make the car stay on the track pointing the right way around. This does not mean you should give up and pull the ejection seat handle. Don't throw away whatever options are left to you.

It's better to go into the gravel/dirt/mud forward than sideways (I unintentionally got to practice this. If I can do it, you can too). It's much better to go into the gravel/dirt/mud than into a cement wall (and murder your BMW's mule's nose, as one student did). You get the idea -- if the car is not airborne and the shiny side is still up, you still have influence over the outcome. Use it.

And finally...
If you have the chance to take an affordable high-performance driving school, I recommend highly that you do. It's a blast and it's good for you. And don't forget to pray for rain.