ADVANCED DRIVING EUROPE, Advanced Driver Training

      Know your car.         This may seem to be a somewhat irrelevant piece of advice but it is one of the important requisites to becoming an Advanced Driver.

To-day every professional driver has a strong input on the handling etc., characteristics of their vehicle that they can feed back to their team's engineers in order to make vital improvements. Now, you may not be in that league, but nontheless, having your car in tip-top driving condition car make your driving and your journey safer and more enjoyable.

I have written down a check list, not necessarily in the essential order, but one that is useful, practical and sensible that should become part and parcel of your everyday driving.

Are the four (and the spare) tyre pressures correct?   Have you filled the windscreen wash bottle?    Are the windscreen wipers working?          When did you last check the battery connections?   Has anything been left switched on overnight that could cause the battery to run down?    Have you recently checked the oil, brake fluid/clutch fluid levels?   Are all the lights working?   Are the lights correctly aligned?       Have you switched off the fog light?   Is your handbrake in good working order?   Are the floor mats securely positioned under the pedals?     Are your mirrors correctly aligned?    Have you got your driving seat in the correct position?    Are you wearing your safety belt correctly?    Have you enough fuel for your journey?    

You may be surprised at some of the items on this list, but  I know from experience, that many people are less than careful regarding car checks and tend to ignore these important pointers. In fact, the majority of call outs to emergency services are for flat batteries and no fuel...........

Enjoy your driving.

ADRIAN.

I am often asked what is the difference between the average driver and the professional driver and this can be summed up by the ability of the latter to ... CONCENTRATE;     in other words, to focus 100% on what they are doing as a driver, irrespective of where they are driving, under what conditions or, the vehicle they are using.

A recent example comes to mind of how this difference was shown up when I took a driver who has many years'  driving under his belt for a test drive.     During this time, I observed that he (possibly through nervousness) talked too much and while talking,  consistantly observed me, not the busy road ahead and around him.     When coming onto a dual carriageway from a slip road, he hesitated,  braked, accelerated, then braked again - causing  much confusion both to the driver behind him  and to the quick-moving traffic already on the road.          He failed to notice a set of traffic lights, only reacting when the driver ahead of him  braked and stopped on the amber light, thus causing my driver to hit his brakes too aggressively  (had it been wet, we could have hit that driver) resulting in too hard (and too noisy) a stop.

Again, through lack of concentration, my driver missed a destination sign on a roundabout and instead of going round again to pick up his road, panicked,  braked hard and  caused  much irritation to the other drivers surrounding him.    Later, he missed a stop sign - at the bottom of a steep hill -  stopping just in time, with the vehicle half-way across the white line!   

I had noted that this man was often in the wrong gear.  He explained that he was not used to the new car which was a diesel as formerly, he had always driven a petrol engined vehicle.    However, as he has this car for more than a month, I feel that he should have been more familiar with the differences in pulling power/gearing, between the two types of cars.

The two worrying aspects of this driver were:-

                          (a)              his failure to concentrate on the task in hand, and

                         (b)              his lack of ability to think (and react) quickly enough.

The next time you drive your car, be honest with yourself, do any of the above apply to you?   If so, practice concentrating on your driving and on your reactions.    You will soon find yourself becoming a first class driver.

Kind regards, Adrian.