This may be a very controversial essay for some readers. Many probably will disagree with the things I am going to say in here because of lack of knowledge and the amount of hearsay that gets spread around as fact. But driving slow and safe is the most dangerous type of driving you can do if that’s all you know.
Before you judge me as a crazy person here are my credentials. I am a race car driver in Formula 3 and Nascar. I have been driving and racing since I was 10 years old and have nearly 3 engineering degrees now, giving me insights into driving that are very unique.
From all of my experience I have at the race track an on normal roads with people, nothing is more dangerous than only learning how to drive slow and safe. The plain and simple fact is, driving slow and safe may appear the safest way to drive until you get in a situation where you’re about to have an accident, then it’s all over and you pretty much have no chance to avoid crashing if all you have ever done is safe, slow driving.
The reason why that is so is because if all you have ever done is safe slow driving then when you are driving like that on the road you are driving at your limit and capacity. There is no more skill to be found above that to rely on when it’s needed, and you can’t in a crash scenario just magically develop these skills to use, or think what to do in the moment, no, there is no time, you literally freeze up and panic, you can’t think, the only thing that can save you is if you have developed muscle memory from countless hours of practicing this scenario beforehand and you can react purely off instinct without thought, Muscle memory developed from 100’s of hours of driving a car in a safe environment where you drive the car in a manner where it is out of control, and then have learned how to bring it back into control. Doing this over and over in such a way that it now has become instinctual, built in muscle memory that requires no thought, it all comes down to practicing driving the car past it’s limits, knowing where those limits are and how to bring a car back into control if you end up in a slide or something that is out of the limits of the car.
Here is some more reasoning. How can one know how quick their car can stop from 60 miles an hour if they have never tried to slow down the quickest from that speed? If you have never tried to stop your car the quickest at that speed, how do you know how much distance your car requires to come to a dead stop at that speed? If you don’t know the shortest distance it takes to stop your car at that speed how can you know if you are not going to stop in time if a car suddenly is stopped in front of you while you are traveling at that speed? If you don’t know if you can stop in time before hitting the car until it’s too late, how can you make any other choices of what to do in the small time you have before hitting the car in front of you? Can you see how this plays out in this one scenario of many?
Where as if you know how quickly your car can stop in an emergency situation, you can know right from the start, if you won’t stop in time before you even hit the brakes, because you know your cars limits and capabilities, and as such can then implement another strategy like turning while braking, and going up the curb on the grass on the side of the road to avoid crashing into the back of the car.
This is just one of many of the limits of the car that need to be discovered by the driver and practiced in order to develop the muscle memory to react in a crash scenario. Others are:



Learning how sharp a car can turn at different speeds before loosing grip on the front tires, or before loosing grip on the rear tires. This one is important for if say an animal jumps out in front of you. How quick can your car swerve at that speed? Will your car go into a slide if you try? Can you bring your car safely out of a slide with ease if that happened?




Learning how quickly your car can accelerate from stationary up to different speed limits. We are all human and make mistakes in judgment in driving, sometimes we might pull out in front of a car when there really wasn’t enough room to, will our car be able to take off fast enough so we don’t get rear ended? or do we have to make another choice of action where we just pull straight up over the curb and off the side of the road to get out of the cars way to avoid a collision?




Learning how your car responds at different speeds in the rain or snow or black ice. Each scenario changes all of the cars characteristics. Have you had enough practice learning how your car handles in each? Under braking? Accelerating fast from stationary? Cornering sharply? Recovering from a slide at high speeds? All of these scenarios need to be practiced in an open environment where there is no people around, there’s nothing to hit when practicing loosing control of the vehicle and it’s safe to do so.




Knowing how your car handles when it has a full load of people in it or if you are towing a trailer behind. Again added weight changes all of the cars handling characteristics


If there is one thing out of all of these skills to practice I think it is the skill of learning how to drift.
This is where I am going to explain something that I believe not many people realize. You see, there are two types of friction, static friction, where two surfaces are in contact with each other and not sliding due to the friction between them, and dynamic friction, where two surfaces are in contact with each other but enough force is applied to overcome the static friction so that one is now sliding past the other. Friction still is at play here but the point to note is it takes less force to keep the object sliding once it’s already sliding then to break the friction from a stand still to get it sliding. Can you see where I might be going here in relation to car tires and the road?
The nature of friction is such that it takes more force to get an object to break static friction and start sliding then it does to keep an object sliding once it’s in motion. What this means is that a tire when it is in contact with the ground rolling, but not sliding on the surface, can take greater forces of turning and braking than once it starts to break traction and is now in a dynamic friction scenario, where once the tire has started to slide on the road it now takes less force to keep it sliding.
This is where is it dangerous is because someone takes a corner fast and the tire is on the edge of it’s grip limit, the second it steps past the grip limit and slides it then will keep sliding as less force is required to keep it sliding until the force is reduced and it can return back to static friction conditions. The problem is once the tire slips the cars inertia turning the corner will want to keep it in a slipping state where say the back end of the car is sliding out, unless you reduce the force by turning the steering wheel the other way, This leads to all sorts of problems of overcorrecting the car and then crashing it into something else, or not correcting it enough and spinning out into something etc.
I see this all the time with fast experienced race drivers. I am in the car with them and they are driving fast, but the second they take a corner just a little too fast, and the back tires break traction on the road, they all of a sudden are in unfamiliar territory of sliding where they don’t know what to do and they crash. It’s literally because in that moment of a slide, the dynamics of the car are completely different and it doesn’t matter how much driving experience they have under normal circumstances, they now have zero driving experience of how the car handles with these new dynamics when it’s in a slide.
This is why I recommend learning the skill of drifting as the most important skill to develop if I was to pick one solely. Having that time in a car when it’s constantly in a sliding state and learning how it feels in that state, how to keep it in a slide or pull it out when you want. Feeling that edge of grip on the tire where the tire transitions from static friction to dynamic friction and then learning how to handle a car when it’s in that sliding state. This in my opinion is what separates the good drivers from the best in racing. Is they know and can feel where that static friction limit of grip is and drive there and if they push a little past that and the car becomes unstable and gets in a slide, it’s not a big deal and they correct it without thinking, out of muscle memory and instinct, from hours and hours of practice.
This is the key factor in them being a safe driver on the normal roads, is they know the limits of their car when driving safe and slowly but in an instant when an unpredictable crash scenario arises, their instincts and muscle memory kicks in, and they get themselves out of these crash scenarios without breaking a sweat. It’s just natural to them as their instinctive reflexes are developed and they become the safest drivers on the road that stop lots of accidents from even happening. Driving safe and slow on the roads to them is like 10% capacity of their driving capabilities they have developed and so nothing now really phases them no matter what arises out of the blue.
So in conclusion if you drive safe and slow and haven’t spent the time learning your cars limits not developed the automated skills in recovering a car out of control, then you’re basically an accident waiting to happen and a hazard to other people on the road I’m sorry to say. So go take your car out in a big parking lot at night, where there is nothing to hit, nor people around, and have some fun practicing getting your car out of control and then how to recover it, learning your minimum breaking distance required to stop at different speeds, taking off fast up to different speed limits from a stand still, turning sharply left and right to see how your car responds. Just have fun with it and you will see a huge change in your confidence level when driving normally on the road and you will know what to do when the time comes that it matters
My apologies if there are a lot of grammatical and spelling mistakes in this paper, like run on sentences etc, but I wrote this between the hours of 1am and 5am in the morning as it’s the only time I had spare to write it while trying to fit all the rest of my homework in day to day to maintain my 4.0 GPA in the last engineering degree I’m finishing up at the moment.
It is rather painful for me to look back over and read, since I have nearly 3 engineering degrees, but I just simply don’t have the time or energy to commit to put into making this a polished piece. Hence why I am trying to apply for this scholarship so I can get some money behind me to help ease up the burdens of the current situation I am in, trying to juggle full time school, racing and finances. Being at university as long as I have sends you broke haha. I haven’t had time to apply for any scholarships during the whole of my schooling, so this is my first one, but I came across this one and couldn’t resist but share the cool insights I have, as I have such a huge passion for driving and racing and doing it as safely as possible so no accidents happen.
I have a lot of aspirations in the future I want to accomplish and will make great contributions to society and technology in the automotive industry once I have finished up my schooling. That I can assure you with the amount of ideas I have stowed away. No one has combined 3 engineering fields together like I have and if you want to see more of what I do and the type of things I have done so far you can follow me on my Instagram, which is called @jamesfromperth