Your Car: Weapon of Survival

"A high degree of emphasis is placed on avoiding the X," says Scott, referring to the physical location where an attacker wants to corner you. If you can do that, "you've taken a huge element of surprise away from the terrorist, and exploited one of his weaknesses."
Key to the training are the simulated environments created in the school's 472-acre facility, which encompasses two road-racing courses (a third will be added this spring), three shooting ranges, an explosives range and several close-quarter combat rooms. The three-lane asphalt tracks contain features such as grass, gravel and dirt shoulders, hills, blind curves, wooded areas, and paddocks with simulated intersections -- everything Scott needs in order to replicate an urban attack or rural ambush. "I can't reproduce desert," he jokes, giving a sideways nod to the snowdrifts lining the course. "But short of that, we're able to tailor the driving environment to what the student is likely to encounter."



Perhaps the trickiest maneuver Scott teaches is how to drive from the passenger's seat. Once again I find myself facing a roadblock, only this time I'm riding shotgun when the driver is shot dead. Not wanting to share his fate, I slide to the center of the car, slam the brakes with my left foot, throw the car into reverse, and hit the gas. When the speedometer reaches 40 mph, I stand on the brakes and spin the wheel. I shift back into drive mid-turn and floor the accelerator pedal when the car spins a full 180 degrees. From there, the roadblock fades in my rearview mirror.



Scott and his team of 24 instructors -- all of them former racecar drivers and military personnel -- also emphasize more aggressive skills, like how to spin another car. Forget all the Hollywood nonsense about ramming the back of a car, or slamming against it from the side -- all that does is bend sheet metal. Instead, give the target vehicle a hard nudge between its rear wheelwell and back bumper. Alternately, if you find yourself the target of such an attack, protect that flank as if your life depended on it, because it just might. Speed up and swerve, so your attacker can only hit you in the back bumper, or slow down so he comes fully alongside.



Such techniques are particularly well suited to the kind of opportunistic attacks that occur daily in Iraq and Afghanistan. "You get ambushed or sniped from a medium or short distance," says Mike, a fellow student and U.S. Army captain who will head a team patrolling the countryside in
Afghanistan. Making a quick escape is critical to survival, because such impromptu attackers aren't likely to have contingency plans for pursuit -- they just want a shot at the first Americans who come along.



Fittingly, the final segment of the class concentrates on how to leave your attackers in the dust, which for Scott translates into high-speed driving techniques like entering a corner at 70 mph and cutting through it such that you lose a bare minimum of speed. These lessons aren't unique to Scott's curriculum; you can learn the same skills at any high-performance driving school. But taught against the backdrop of international terrorism, which amounted to 199 attacks in 2002 alone (77 of them pointedly anti-American), these skills take on a whole new dimension. "Without training, your chances of escaping a terrorist ambush without being injured or kidnapped are about 1 in 10," says Scott. "With training, your chances are 6 in 10 of coming out safely."