The Outlaw's Guide to Back-Road Speed

From Road & Track

I was just trying to save myself a little bit of annoyance, but in retrospect I suppose it was like waving a red flag in front of an angry bull. It was late afternoon and I was pulling out onto one of Southern California's infamous canyon roads. There was a 5-Series Bimmer heading up the hill towards me. Rightly or wrongly, I assume that all 5-Series drivers are like my former multiple-Funfer-owning father: slow and steady. To avoid being stuck behind him for the next forty miles, I pulled out rather precipitously, gave an apologetic wave, and started to accelerate. Three seconds later, I heard the growl of a V8 and looked into my rearview mirror to see the BMW's double-kidney grille stretched all the way across my field of vision.

My steed for this race was a 150-horsepower Japanese car with an automatic transmission. My opponent had twice the power and, judging by the hand gestures he was making, three times the aggression. Ahead of us was a five-thousand-foot climb to the summit of a small mountain range. It was game on.

As a pre-teenaged fan of automotive journalism from both this country and the United Kingdom, I spent many an afternoon at the local library thrilling to stories of impossibly-rapid back-road derring-do. I read each one with an entirely uncritical eye and assumed that there was never any exaggeration in them. As a teenager, I spent countless hours in my Volkswagen Fox trying to do exactly what my heroes had described, never quite matching their descriptions of triple-digit terror between tight hairpins but still managing to scare myself so often that I eventually became blasé about the speeds and the danger involved.

I'm not sure whether it was a relief or a disappointment to actually drive with some of the people I'd read in my youth and to find that their definition of "B-road warp speed" really amounted to flooring the gas pedal at the exit of every curve and burying the brake at the next corner entry. I was so much faster, so much more reckless, than they were. I felt like the aliens in Galaxy Quest who built a starship because they didn't realize that their favorite TV show was fictional.

In the end, it doesn't really matter. We live in an era where there's no excuse for treating public roads like a racetrack. Not when it's so easy to actually get on a track and experience the real thing. Still, there may be a time in the future where you find yourself with a much faster car at your back bumper and you, for whatever reason, decide you'd rather drop that sucker than be a decent human being and just pull into the next turnout. None of what you're about to read is endorsed or recommended by anybody, least of all me, okay? So, without further ado. . .

The key to truly frightening back-road pace, particularly on an unknown road, is vision. Rally drivers are fast during their events because they have pace notes and a co-driver to call those notes out ahead of time. Everyday drivers don't get either, so you'll have to use your eyes. You should be scanning back and forth at the absolute limit of what you can see, focusing back to the immediate road ahead maybe once a second. Most "blind corners" and blind crests on a road aren't really blind if you can look ahead to what you can see past the corner. Over time, you'll learn to accurately predict whether the road goes next.

Looking ahead to the limit of your vision will also help prevent striking an animal, a parked car, or a major bit of debris on the road. Keep your ears open, as well; it helps to drive with your windows down and listen for the sound of an engine in the distance. After thirty years on Ohio roads, I've come to associate the sound of an unmuffled V8 with the imminent head-on appearance of an old pickup truck taking up all of his lane and some of mine.

When your vision is correct, you can work on midcorner speed. On a racetrack, you have multiple laps to work up to the maximum midcorner speed, but on a twisty two-lane you'll only get one look at each corner. Most drivers over-brake for each turn and then take far too much time getting off the brake for the corner entrance. Give yourself a short, controlled stab at the pedal using maximum pressure short of ABS activation. Then roll off the pedal as you start to bend into the turn. This will get the weight of the car over the front wheels so you have maximum steering response and cornering capability. A good rule of thumb is that the tires should "sing" but not "squeal." A squealing tire means you have no traction left for any change of condition. Great for the track, deadly for the road.

Once you're in the corner, avoid sudden movements of your hands. Keep the throttle steady-they call this "maintenance throttle" at a trackday. If you see something in the middle of the turn that shouldn't be there, unwind the wheel and engage the ABS pronto. Other than that, don't touch the brake in the middle of the corner.

As soon as you can see the exit, get on the throttle and unwind the wheel. If you do this sooner than the car behind you, it will take a lot of motor to make up the resulting gap. Resist the temptation to look at your speedometer. You already know that you're speeding, right? So keep your vision up and try not to be any more of a menace to society than you already are.

Most corners you'll find on a backroad have some sort of equivalent on a track. The exception to that is the long, long, long changing-radius corner. This is a feature of many mountain and canyon roads from California to West Virginia, usually because it's the easiest way to get a route up and down a steep elevation change on a large bit of terrain. With this turn, you have to adjust your behavior depending on whether you're going uphill or downhill. Uphill, keep your steering hands fixed in one position. Use additional throttle to widen your line and lift the throttle (gently!) to tighten your line. It's okay to go into this turn a little faster than you think you should, as you'll have greater traction uphill and you'll lose momentum throughout the midcorner.

Going downhill, it's a different story-and this, my friend, is where the back-road legends shine. Enter at the maximum possible speed for the corner that you can see, but trail the brake ever-so-gently with your left foot while applying no throttle whatsoever. Coast through the turn, brushing the brake to turn in and releasing it to let the nose go wide. When you see a bump or dip in the road, relax your fingers on the wheel and permit it to wobble in your hands a bit. Overcorrecting an oscillation is far worse than letting a minor one occur.

By doing all of the above and operating at what I felt to be the safe grip limit of my tires, I dropped that big BMW out of my rearview mirror in just ten or twelve turns. I could hear his engine roaring and the tires squealing behind me, but he wasn't putting it all together smoothly. Then, as I came out of one fast turn heading uphill, I saw the F-150 of a sheriff's deputy heading the other way. Never have I been so glad to be driving an underpowered car; I was over the speed limit but not by that much. He decided to hit his brakes anyway, probably to cite me. I was around the next turn and gone. No way he was going to catch me in a truck, even if I drove the speed limit between turns. But then I heard that big BMW growling. . . and I heard the growling stop.

Although I stopped up the road a few miles to take a few pictures and check my e-mail, I never saw that deputy, or the BMW, again. I suppose there's a lesson there, too: the fastest way to get through a back road is to go just slow enough that you don't spend half an hour getting a ticket. No Bavarian bent-eight in the world can make up that kind of time.

Born in Brooklyn but banished to Ohio, Jack Baruth has won races on four different kinds of bicycles and in seven different kinds of cars. Everything he writes should probably come with a trigger warning. His column, Avoidable Contact, runs twice a week.