The pros teach Driver’s Edge

Sam Morris

IndyCar driver Marco Andretti, the grandson of legendary driver Mario Andretti, tells Bishop Gorman High student Brittany Young how to steer out of a spin last month during a Driver’s Edge safety course at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

By Ron Kantowski (contact)

Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2009 | 2 a.m.

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to write more often about the positive side of sports, and less about Pacman Jones and John Daly.

That partly explains this column about the Driver’s Edge course founded by Las Vegas resident Jeff Payne in 2002.

The other part is that on the day it snowed a couple of weeks ago, I was nearly mowed down by a young driver who lost control of his old man’s sports car as I walked to the 7-Eleven at the end of my block for a Big Bite and a couple of taquitos.

I was walking because the roads were slick, and when I was his age, my driver’s ed course consisted of our high school football coach telling us to get behind the wheel and start driving to West Lafayette, Ind., where Purdue was practicing twice a day.

Don’t worry about parallel parking, he said. There’s a big field behind the stadium that has all kinds of room.

I never learned how to parallel park. Or, more important, how to drive on slick roads.

Neither did Payne. The Spanish teacher who taught him how to drive didn’t think it was that important, either.

“We went to get his coffee or to the dry cleaners to pick up his cleaning,” Payne said. “That’s probably why I totaled my car after having my license for 36 hours.”

Payne says drivers in this country, with few exceptions, aren’t taught how to drive. They are taught only how to pass a test.

“Yet everybody is so quick to point a finger at young drivers for being reckless and out of control. But why should we expect them to act any other way when they’ve never been shown what their limitations are?”

That’s what Driver’s Edge

(www.driversedge.com) is about. Young drivers, aged 16-21, learn what it feels like to lose traction on a slick road by actually losing traction on a slick road — a skid pad in a controlled environment.

And they learn it for free (thanks to sponsors such as Bridgestone tires, the IndyCar Series and the Nevada Public Safety Department) in an “MTV environment,” Payne says. That means the instructors aren’t high school football coaches or Spanish teachers but cool-looking guys who race cars for a living.

Guys named Andretti, for instance.

“I’m involved because I’m a true believer in it,” said Marco Andretti, the 21-year-old grandson of Mario Andretti. Marco’s father, Michael, was good enough to have driven on the Formula One circuit, too, following in the tire tracks of his legendary father, the last American driver to have won the F-1 World Driving Championship.

Marco Andretti, a budding superstar in his own right who came within a whisker of winning the 2006 Indianapolis 500 as a 19-year-old, was one of the guest instructors at the recent Driver’s Edge session at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. He was joined by Arie Luyendyk Jr., who also has raced at Indy and whose father of the same name, auto racing’s original Flying Dutchman, won the 500 twice.

Those guys would have lapped me and my football coach three times on the way to Purdue football practice. But they were quick to point out that Driver’s Edge isn’t about driving fast or winning races, but about controlling a car under circumstances that drivers without catlike reflexes and surnames of Indy 500 champions encounter every day.

Andretti said the Driver’s Edge program is just as important, if not more important, than knowing the rules of the road.

“You can know what the signs say and everything like that but you’re almost always going to put in a situation where you need car control. It can end up being a lifesaver,” he said.

Since Payne founded the course, Driver’s Edge has conducted 325 sessions in 40 U.S. markets (the program is held here regularly) with more than 55,000 young drivers and their parents taking advantage of the free program. One day, he hopes Driver’s Edge will become a mandatory component in acquiring a driver’s license. Until then, he’ll continue to derive satisfaction from teaching drivers who are wet behind the ears how to swim by taking down fences.

But, hopefully, not with the back end of their old man’s sports car.

“It’s like when kids drown in swimming pools, and everybody’s trying to build a fence around the pool instead of trying to teach them how to swim,” Payne said.

“That’s what we’re trying to do with this program.”