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Driver's Edge offers teens free course in advanced driving

A team of racing professionals – including many current and former IndyCar, NASCAR, drifting and sportscar drivers – will offer free driving tips to young drivers aged 15-to-21 at Foxboro Stadium June 28 and 29.

Driver’s Edge is a non-profit organization based in Las Vegas that this year has added Foxboro to its schedule of some 40 cities. To date, some 50,000 teenagers and their parents have taken the course which includes classroom and hands-on training.

The course is “designed to alter young driver attitudes and behavior and to serve as a “wake-up call” to help erase the video game mentality that is common among many of today’s young drivers,” according to a news statement.

Founder and president Jeff Payne said he founded the non-profit in 2002 because he was frustrated with what he perceived to be inadequacies in training young drivers.

“Everyone blames the kids,” he said in a recent interview. “Everyone points fingers at the kids, but they have never been taught to drive.”

“They’ve been taught to pass a test, and that’s good, but they are not prepared for the hazards of everyday life,” he said. “They’ve never received the proper training.”

The training is divided into four separate groups scheduled for morning or afternoon sessions on the Saturday and Sunday. Each session has space for 100 students, but the program tends to fill up fast. In addition, Payne says he encourages parents to attend.

Course and registration details are available at www.driversedge.org.

Driver’s Edge’s four-and-a-half-hour course is similar to the training offered by Boston-based In Control (incontroladt.com), which offers $300 courses at five locations in the area, including Seekonk Speedway where it conducted courses last Wednesday and Thursday.

In Control is smaller, having trained some 7,500 students since it was founded in 2002, according to spokesman Sean Martin.

In Control founder Brandon Bogart said his company offers training in such real-life problems as tailgating which he said was a major cause of accidents, especially among teenagers.

Payne, a former race car driver, said he supported all efforts to educate teenagers, including the courses offered by In Control and the Skip Barber Racing School (the nearest is at Lime Rock Park).

But he said he wanted Driver’s Edge to be free – “I did not want to be tearing my hair out worrying whether enough kids had registered,” he said – and found a major supporter in Bridgestone Tires.

“How can we help you, what do we do,” he said Bridgestone asked him and the company has been a national sponsor ever since.

“Driving,” Payne said, “continues to get more difficult for kids.”

He said teenagers need a car and it’s a sense of freedom for both parents who don’t have to drive them and for the teens who are on their own.

Meanwhile, “there are more and more distractions,” he said, citing iPods and cell phones. “It’s getting worse and worse.”

He said statistically, young male drivers make up 75 percent of the fatalities while young female drivers, who drive slower but are often distracted, make up over 50 percent of the injuries.

“With guys, it’s peer pressure,” he said, noting they tend to egg each other on with such famous last words as: “Come on, Dude, you can catch the light.”

Posted by Peter C. T. Elsworth  at 1:58 PM to Safety , Teenage Drivers | Permalink | Comments 0

Backseat Driver: Slow down and take YOUR time

There is no question about it: if you want to save gas (and money), slow down.

That’s the overriding advice on all the Web sites I went to while researching a piece for Saturday’s projoCars section on practical solutions to high gas prices.

But driving slower is not so simple as it sounds because it requires a radical change in one’s attitude toward time.

Most of us are hopeless managers of time. And that’s an odd thing when you think about it, because time and energy are about all we get on this good earth. (Think of money as an abstract form of time and energy.)

As a journalist, it has been my privilege to meet people from all walks of life and I have found that successful people tend to be great time managers. Their offices are neat, their affairs ordered.

The rest of us bumble along, lurching from one apparent crisis to another. I say apparent because all too often the crisis is more in the line of getting the kids to school, paying the bills, buying the groceries, doing the washing, organizing the family holiday, worrying about gas prices … well, the list goes on and on. And on.

The net result is that most of us are often in a hurry. And when you are in a hurry, it’s mighty hard to cruise along in the middle lane at a steady 65 mph. Cruising along is the last thing on our minds.

But if we want to save gas (and money) by developing good driving habits, they start long before we get in the car or truck. They start with an entirely new perspective toward time and making better use of it. And that may not be a bad thing at all.

- Peter C.T. Elsworth

Posted by Peter C. T. Elsworth  at 1:56 PM to commentary | Permalink | Comments 0