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BangShift Question Of The Day: When Did You Last Teach Yourself A New Driving Technique?


BangShift Question Of The Day: When Did You Last Teach Yourself A New Driving Technique?

Nobody was home. Our nearest neighbor wasn’t home. Even my pain-in-the-ass tattletale of a brother wasn’t home yet. And the yard was pretty much loose turned dirt with a bit of moisture on it…perfect for trying out what I wanted to do. I don’t know how many middle-school kids ever consider sneaking out a car to do Rockford turns, but here I was in the 1973 Comet, preparing to do just that. I’d seen The Rockford Files before…how hard could it be? I put the Comet to the edge of the field, just barely nosing into the Scotch broom to give myself as much room as possible, took a deep breath, shifted into reverse and started digging into the throttle. Once I hit a speed that I was sufficiently scared of, I cranked the wheel full left and lightly tapped the brakes, which got the front end upset enough to slide. Mid-slide, I jammed the car into gear and stood on it, and proceeded to start ripping donuts in celebration, engine singing along as I was war-whooping and yelling all sorts of things in pure adrenaline-fueled mania. Fun over, I parked the car back where it belonged and hoped that nobody would notice.

How freaking stupid was I as a kid?! Like nobody is gonna notice donut marks and that the primer black Mercury is covered in a reverse roostertail of mud and has a hot, ticking 302 between the shock towers. At least I got lucky that time, unlike when I practiced doing burnouts with my Impala and had my mother roll up to a front yard full of tire smoke. That was a bad freaking afternoon for yours truly.

From just learning the basics on how to drive to pulling some of the dumbest stunts on Earth, at some point you are a completely untested variable behind the controls of a machine you hope you fully understand. You have to practice over and over again to get it right. My first dirt-bike wheelie was a pure accident, not knowing that a Yamaha YZ-80 actually had the grunt to get things interesting if I balanced my weight right. My first true drift that wasn’t on dirt happened when I found some loose gravel and dust on the I-25 onramp from Uintah Street one night, allowing my Monte Carlo to hang tail and keep the rears lit up for quite a distance. You had to start somewhere…your first dragstrip run, your first autocross, your first mud bog. And you’re never too old to learn a new trick. So what was the last one you taught yourself?


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