Jeremy Bass•24 Aug 2013

NEWS

Audi's Driving Experience: turning out better drivers

Practice and patience required to be safer on the road, but this one-day program is a good starting point

"Hands up if you put yourself in the top 20 per cent of drivers."

Steve Pizzati – racer turned driving instructor and former Top Gear Australia presenter – greets a group of journalists and a smattering of celebrity Audi brand ambassadors.

Virtually everyone's hand goes up. Most of those hands would hesitate if he asked the same thing come day's end.

The occasion was the Audi Driving Experience – a driver training program the German prestige brand offers those looking to get the most out of their cars. We're in a room by the pits at Melbourne's Sandown International Raceway.

Not that we're here to learn how to be better hoons. More the opposite, in fact.

"That's what instructors are up against," Pizzati told motoring.com.au later. "Everyone's a terrific driver – just ask them."

Pizzati reckons there should be no surprise in this. "It's what we're inured to telling ourselves and everyone around us. We're actively discouraged from taking responsibility for our shortcomings. Look at how insurers insist we mustn't admit liability for accidents. But it can be really subtle, too, in news reports that 'the car lost control'. It's not the car that loses control."

How do the gender stereotypes stand up? Are women more cautious? Do men have better reflexes?

"No, not really," Pizzati replied. "Put simply, very few people, men or women, could honestly say they're immune to silliness in the car, be it speeding, texting at the wheel, whatever. Not me, not anyone.

"Nothing brings stupidity out in sensible people like driving. We get so many Einsteins here who take drive days like this as their opportunity to reveal their natural gifts at the wheel, doing things like dropping back a way during the follow-the-leader circuits then hammering it to catch up. And they all think they're the first to think of it. Like we haven't seen it – and felt it ourselves – a million times before.

"So that's what we do: we pre-empt them. A really important part of what we do here is in cutting through driver self-delusion."

More about that shortly.

Our one-day Audi Driving Experience was divided into four segments: handling oversteer; the effective use of ABS under hard braking; a follow-the-leader exercise mapping out the most efficient lap of the Sandown raceway, and a precision-driving motorkhana course introducing participants to petrol and diesel variants of the new A3 Sportback.

Is it worth the $750? Yes, for how effective it is in introducing us to our real selves in a context where we really need to know us.

But the value proposition is really only cemented with appropriate follow-up – lots and lots of practice.

Other, more affordable ways to become a better driver? Pizzati's suggestions range from government policy to individual purchase decisions.

Ramp up driver education in high schools

Ask Pizzati what he'd do if he was appointed Minister for Driver Education and settle back – you're in for a ride.

"Very few people actually know what to do when a car loses control. That cuts to the bone of how we're taught to drive."

His first policy announcement would be the introduction of driver education into high school curricula from Year 9 up.

"It'd cover off in detail how vehicles work. Particularly safety systems – things like ESC [stability control] and ABS.

"Most people don't have a clue what's actually going on down there, even though it's pretty simple to explain. And once they know about it, they're better equipped to understand what they can and can't do. I think that should extend to basic maintenance stuff as well. Particularly on new cars, virtually nothing's needed between services. But even though all you find is a plastic cover when you open the bonnet, there's a reason it has holes in it for things like oil, water, brake fluid and the like."

He'd extend the curriculum to road law as well, "including a good look at what's actually going on when you're driving drunk or stoned."

Does he see it as better to learn on a manual than an auto?

"It's less relevant these days [as technologies like DCTs and shift paddles blur the line between the two], but I'd frankly prefer P-platers particularly drive manuals only. Having to change gears keeps the devil from finding work for idle hands. Things like texting are a lot harder when your next gear change is a couple of seconds away.

"And we all do it. I lecture people on it, but I'm not entirely innocent of the odd glance in stop-start traffic or at lights."

Better tyres: two benefits for the price of one

What's the best way to spend your money improving your car's performance? The answer will surprise many and disappoint youngsters combing eBay for skirts, spoilers and extractors.

But Pizzati is unequivocal: "Tyres. It's a no brainer: spend every cent you can on them."

The performance improvement is matched or exceeded in safety.

"Decent rubber really does spell the difference between getting round a bend or sliding off it. I mean, the responses of virtually every other safety mechanism in the car are determined by tyre performance," he said. "Good tyres are the primary safety measure."

This means doing whatever it takes to trade up from the cheapies that come with cheap cars aimed at the youth market, he said. "The best thing you can do with them is put them on eBay and go upmarket. And you don't even have to spend much more to start seeing improvements. You'll find a $150 tyre is palpably better than a $100 one, a $200 one better again, and so on.

"Look at it this way: the insurance premium [and excess] you save when you make it round that bend or dodge that pole will cover the difference on the upgrade. With change."

On safety, Pizzati is confident drivers will see the sharpest acceleration in improvements in automotive history in the not too distant future – improvements of sufficient magnitude to see driver education lose much of its current relevance.

"We're probably five years away from autonomous vehicles reaching the roads properly."

Cars fitted with the technology are already registered and well into long-term testing in the US by Google and others.

"Give it ten years more and it'll be standard fixture," he said. "We've already seeing mainstream models arrive with the technology in basic form. Five years ago, autonomous emergency braking (AEB) barely existed. Now it's coming out in the next-gen Mazda3 – the best-selling car in the country.

"Vehicle autonomy will go a long way to making people like me redundant. It'll just be a matter of putting the road rules into the vehicle settings when you put the destination in the sat-nav."

So the future of driving will involve less driving? "Yeh. Or at least it will become a choice – more a hobby than a day-to-day inevitability. Which is fine, because let's face it, commuting's not driving."

Lessons of the day 1: how to lose your back end

Understeer is that tendency a car demonstrates to resist changing direction. You know when you go into a corner at speed, how the car resists turn-in? That's understeer – a tendency to broaden the radius of a turn. It's a by-product of natural vector forces – when an object builds up momentum in a straight line, it resists alterations to its path.

Chassis engineers incorporate mild understeer into most cars. The driver has to keep a bit of pull on the wheel up to the apex of the turn to complete it.

Oversteer is the opposite. That's when the rear wheels let go, tightening the radius on turn-in. For many an untrained driver on public roads, it's the precursor to bad things. Oversteer has killed and maimed lots of people.

The best cure for oversteer is electronic stability control. ESC works by looking for mismatches between the direction the steering wheels are pointing and the direction the vehicle as a whole is travelling. When it detects sufficient discrepancy, it reduces engine power and applies gentle braking on the wheels before they lose their grip. High performance cars often have multiple ESC calibrations, allowing limited slide in sport settings.

ESC proved so effective in reining in the fallout of error and youthful excess that the Victorian government made it compulsory on all cars sold new from January 2011, effectively mandating it across the country.

Those who know how to handle their cars give oversteer another name: drift. A whole competitive motorsport regime has grown around the art of controlled oversteer. With sufficient driving skills and in places set up for it – ie with nothing to bang into – it's terrific fun.

But it also takes some learning. The first exercise of the drive day was designed to give scribes a close look at oversteer.

This meant switching off our stability as we booted up our fleet of RS4s, RS5s, TT-RSs and S7s, then hammering the car off a short run-up into a corner, specially wet down for the occasion. Give it everything the car's got, they said, then jump on the anchors just before the apex.

Many pulled their punches first time round. Many just braked but didn't know what to do with the tiller. Second time round, your correspondent braked too late and not enough, sending his RS5 into a mad spin too fast to countersteer.

Countersteer is the key to keeping control of a car that's losing its back end. It means keeping your front wheels pointing in the direction you want the car to head. Countersteer is counterintuitive for some – it takes training, practice and presence of mind.

We got better with practice, but it rammed home Pizzati's point about – ahem – some drivers' tendencies to overestimate their abilities on the road.

Lessons of the day 2: How ABS saves lives

What happens to stopping distance as velocity increases? In short, it increases too – but exponentially.

Putting this to the test under the controlled conditions of the Audi Driving Experience rams home how much speed matters. Each driver on the day was given a run-up to a point at which we had to stamp on the brakes.

From 50 kays, our TT-RSs and RS4 Avants – models both equipped with excellent brakes – came to a halt in less than 10 metres. Up around 110km/h, this blew out to somewhere around 40 metres (our unmeasured estimate found support in German magazine Autobild's 100-0km/h warm-brake figures: 35.0 for the TT-RS and 33.9 for the RS5).

What does antilock braking (ABS) do? Its primary purpose is to stop the wheels from locking up and sending the car into an uncontrollable skid.

Effectively, then, ABS serves to stop the car in the minimum possible distance while maximising the average driver's chances of maintaining control (if this sounds long-winded, it's because a skilled driver can bring a car to a safe halt in less distance – but most of us don't have those skills). ABS does this by applying braking force until it senses pending lockup, then releasing and reapplying grip until it senses lockup again, and so on.

In real-life nasty situations, ABS allows you to steer around things even as you stomp on the brake pedal. From freeway speeds it's harder than it looks, but it doesn't take much practice before your showing marked improvement. Try the same exercise in a pre-ABS car and you're likely to either bend it round something or go for a washing-machine ride.

This is where the real value lies in Audi's Driving Experience and similar events put on by BMW, Porsche and others. They might not imbue drivers with the skills in a single day, but they will give you a cursory introduction to danger, in a way that fosters the presence of mind to escape it.

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Audi's Driving Experience: turning out better drivers

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