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The sound of a BlackBerry 8830 “World Edition” striking the inside of a Cadillac STS windshield at approximately fifty miles per hour is somewhere between a ‘clack’ and a solid ‘crack’. It was followed by a surprised yelp from my wife as she was momentarily suspended from her safety belt by the g-force of a full-ABS stop, having just lost her smartphone in mid-texting. Unfortunately, there hadn’t been time to warn her that we were about to test the Caddy’s 70-0 stopping ability on a twisting side road. Loafing along, chatting idly about this and that, I’d been almost inattentive to the view ahead – until I’d seen the flash of red coming around the blind corner towards us.

It was a kid, by which I mean a teenager. (When did I start using the word “kid” to refer to people old enough to drive? I suppose it was around the time I became old enough to potentially have a driving-age child of my own.) Young, wide-eyed, fighting for control of his late-Nineties Dodge Avenger R/T, sawing at the wheel to save a corner entry that was probably more than a bit too hot, he was just on his side of the double-yellow when he came into my field of vision. It looked like a solid head-on collision in the making, so I immediately left-footed the pearl-white STS to a halt with two wheels off in the ditch in the hopes he would save the car before he got to our position, or at least slow the thing down enough to keep us all out of the emergency room.

His corner exit was disastrous at best, but a slight change in road camber past the turn gave our rather terrified Avenger driver just enough grip to straighten the car out, and he coasted past us looking for all the world as if he’d lost his primary parachute and been saved by the backup. A few hundred feet down the road, I heard him pick up full throttle again and steam away from us with all the vigor the bespoilered old Mitsu-Dodge could muster up. Reaching up to the dashtop to retrieve her BlackBerry, my wife looked at me expectantly. You see, I’m a veritable firehose of criticism behind the wheel, offering my passengers a constant stream of observations regarding the idiocy, foolhardiness, timidity, yellow-light-early-braking, left-lane-banditry, and general despicability of my fellow motorists. Surely I’d have something to say?

“Good for him,” I smiled, and with that, we resumed our boring little trip to the hardware store.

Oh, to be young and an irresponsible hoon yet again! As a perpetually scowling, angst-ridden teenager, I grabbed my temporary license with two impatient fists and promptly totaled my 16th-birthday present, a slick little Datsun 200SX hatchback, approximately twenty-four minutes into my first unsupervised driving excursion. Sorry, Dad! It was just that I’d been planning to “fishtail” that particular corner for years and I’d never seen a car parked right at the end of said corner before. My punishment for that misdeed was to ride the bus to school for ten long months before getting a 1980 Mercury Marquis Brougham Coupe, a car which made up for its complete lack of power by possessing an amusingly flexy chassis and the natural push-then-swing tendencies of the “Panther” platform. Along with the car, Dad bought me a set of new “Arriva” tires, the rear pair of which I ran right down to the cords in less than eight thousand miles of sideways stupidity all over the roads of Columbus, Ohio. I would tell you the number of times I put that Mercury in one ditch or another in the pursuit of stunt driving, but I don’t think you would believe me. Suffice it to say that all four corners of the Marquis were bent upwards when I finally traded it in on the car you see above, a 1990 Volkswagen Fox two-door complete with four-speed manual transmission.

If I’d been a danger to society in the Marquis, I was worse in the Fox. The little VW would maintain an indicated (and hopelessly optimistic) 107 miles per hour on the freeway, and that was the speed at which I traveled pretty much everywhere. Under the influence of a long string of LJK Setright and David E. Davis, Jr. columns which told lurid (and mostly false) tales of high-speed Autobahn exploits using only a Saab Turbo and a set of string-backed gloves, I resolved to learn “German driving skills” myself, using the public road as my proving grounds.

Perhaps I should have attended a driving school – but the closest one back in 1989 was probably Bob Bondurant’s school in California. Perhaps I should have attended a trackday – but they didn’t exist yet. Perhaps I should have entered an autocross – but I didn’t even know what the word meant. The cozy, incestuous relationship between road driving, autocross, HPDE, and time trials didn’t exist twenty years ago. There were SCCA racers – a creepy-looking bearded bunch who drove putt-puttering Sports Renaults and mostly lived in VW Microbuses – and there were super-cool “Cannonball Run” types who drove all-black European cars and passed innocent users of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Interstate Highway System at closing speed differentials of sixty or seventy miles per hour. I definitely wanted to be one of the latter. Through all four seasons of the year, for years afterwards, I slid, spun, looped, and turfed that little Fox onto lawns, fields, meadows, and highway shoulders. The only defense I can offer for my actions is the same one Gordon Baxter wrote in one of his magical C/D columns back in my youth: I never hurt anyone and I never put a car on its roof.

I’m not talking about street racing, mind you. I never knowingly raced anybody else on the road, although I certainly did the occasional lead-and-follow with a like-minded individual once in a while. I’m talking about getting out there and learning the art of car control one humiliating mistake at a time. Each ditch, each trip up a curb, each heart-stopping high-speed “push” off an exit ramp – each one taught me a valuable lesson about what not to do, and eventually by process of elimination I learned what to do.

In his series of Speed Secrets books, Ross Bentley suggests that many club racers never amount to much because they started too late in life to program their unconscious behaviors. It’s the reason youth karting is a mandatory part of every F1 racer’s career nowadays; the techniques to correct and adjust vehicle balance are learned long before most people even think about staring a racing career. Well, I didn’t grow up in a racing family, I never thought I would have a chance to be a race car driver, and I spent most of my youth racing a bike instead of a car, but I did get a nice early start on those vehicle balance skills, thanks to a two-ton RWD Mercury coupe and a few years of record Ohio winters. All the emergency-handling reactions I learned two decades ago still bubble up when I’m facing a dicey situation on the racetrack. It’s not the kind of thing I’d necessarily tell an auditorium full of fifteen-year-old kids, but it’s true: Driving badly then helped me learn to drive well now.

Which brings me back to my hoonish friend in the Avenger. I couldn’t force myself to be angry with him. He’d given me a bit of a scare, but he was just out doing what I used to do – learning the art of driving with the tools and funding available to him. As long as he stays sober and alert, and as long as he resists the trendy, stupid temptation to race his buddies at 140mph down some far-from-deserted freeway, I don’t see much of a problem. Our modern culture and environment appears designed to suck the motoring courage and heart out of young men, either by convincing them that everything with an internal combustion engine is inherently evil or by media-brainwashing them into a lifestyle consisting of nothing but the sad death march of consumerism, the pseudo-thrills of video gaming, and a constant stream of meaningless casual sex – so any time I see a kid full-throttling some beater down a twisty road, I consider it a middle finger to a society which puts safety helmets on five-year-olds and eight airbags in economy cars. Show me a kid who is willing to put his car in a ditch to find out just how good he really is, and I’ll show you a kid who just might have the heart of a race car driver, whether he knows it or not.

Would-be performance drivers nowadays have many more options available to them than I did, from a well-promoted nationwide SCCA Solo program to a never-ending schedule of open lapping days coast to coast, and I’d advise them to take advantage of those options. At the same time, I’m not naïve. I know that young drivers are still going to test their limits out there on the street, and I also know that the vastly greater capabilities of today’s automobiles make that game much more dangerous. With a modern 300-hp family sedan, you can get into trouble beyond the wildest dreams of an eighty-one-horsie Fox driver. Take my advice, young hoon: It’s a lot of fun to have outrageous driving stories, but make sure you’re alive and around to tell ‘em.

Furthermore, as you rush headlong through the sea of seemingly unaware “everyday drivers”, make sure you’ve ready for the one time you meet someone with the same mentality. A few days after I saw that Avenger ripping around that blind corner, I found myself in my black Phaeton hustling towards a new roundabout in a nearly-deserted new subdivision-to-be. Roundabouts, you see, are all the rage now in Ohio. This one was a beauty, about sixty feet in circumference and two lanes wide. I had a plan to hustle right through it in my big VW, flicking right, left, then right and performing a flawless exit at speed. There was nobody else around… except a kid in a white Jetta heading towards the same roundabout from the next street over. He looked like one of those baggy-pants “emo” kids who hog all the good couches at Starbucks, so I fully expected to be through the circle before he got close to it.

Little did I know that he expected the same to be true – after all, I’m just an old man in a big, nondescript sedan, right? And so we both maintained our speed all the way to corner entry, and we both found ourselves on the way towards occupying exactly the same piece of real estate. He momentarily panicked and swung wide, but I trail-braked the Phaeton to the inside, pulled up alongside the left side of his screeching Jetta , waved, and throttled past before exiting with my previously-planned swish of the tail. I was pleased to see him perform a similar maneuver at his chosen exit just a moment or two later. If there really are aliens watching us, and they have their own version of National Geographic, I can only imagine what their narrator for that show would have said:

“(Whispering) The young hoon challenges the old leader of the pack… With a characteristic screech of tires, their Volkswagens fly together in formation… the canny old fishtailer giving him just enough room to maneuver… and in a moment, another link in the chain of heriditary hoonage is formed….”

Who knows what will happen to that sullen-looking Jetta driver? The chances are nine out of ten that by the time he’s my age, he’ll be just another Camry-driving drone performing a listless life-loop between a miserable job, an uncaring family, and a never-ending series of pathetifc fifteen-handicap golfing/drinking weekends. He’ll have long since stopped expecting to get any kind of enjoyment out of driving. He’ll curse the young kids in their hopped-up old Civic Hybrids and lobby vigorously for more speedbumps in his neighborhood.

And yet there’s that ten-percent chance that he’s not just “going through a phase” – that he will eventually check out an autocross, a trackday, an HPDE, a time-trial class. There’s a chance that after that long grind of competence-building he will someday find himself next to me on the grid, his HANS device chafing his sweating neck and the relentless heat of an uninsulated transmission lightly burning his knee. He won’t recognize me, and I won’t recognize him, but I would consider that young man to be a brother of sorts, a kindred soul, a fellow soldier in the undeclared war against people who hate the automobile and everything for which it has ever stood. I’ll look forward to the day when I see him next to me on the track, driving at his very limit, asking no quarter and receiving none in return – and, dear reader, dare I hope that someday I will see you there, too?