All great athletes have one. Kareem's Sky Hook. Ali's Rope-a-Dope. Brett Favre out of the pocket, loose and on the run. Mariusz Pudzianowski flinging them the Atlas Balls. I figure all great drivers have a signature move, too. And I'll just go ahead and assume that all TTAC readers are great drivers, right? Of course right. And so we ask, what's your secret weapon? Can you hit an apple on the apex? Powerslide around corners? Jump from stump to stump? Maintain complete control in the pouring rain? Before it was taboo, my buddy Rob was proud of the fact that he could yak on the phone, smoke, eat a donut and shift all at once. Hey, this is LA where Rob's feat is a real accomplishment. Now his wife won't let him do three of the four. I'm quite good at heeling and toeing, using the technique every single time I want to slow a car. Hey, it's good on the brakes at the expense of a little gas. But my best move? I can parallel park circles around you. Yours?
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Great question Jonny–I d’nt know how you keep coming up with them. But I have to post another response to yesterday’s, a link to an absolutely hilarious column about getting stuck behind slowpokes (a Subaru, and then a Civic).
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/07/magazine/07funny_humor.t.html?_r=1&scp=3&sq=shalom+auslander&st=nyt&oref=slogin
Ah, I was thinking “parallel park master”, and you went and ended with it.
On more than one occasion have I been used by friends/family to park the car. And I have a keen sense of parking space and the optimal angle/distance from spot to begin the turn-in process.
Other than that, I’m fairly good at anticipating openings in moderate to heavy traffic lanes and am able to slip into them as soon as they open up. A car next to me moves from the center to left lane, I SIMULTANEOUSLY move from right to center lane in their spot.
When I had my old 77 Toyota Corolla, I used to do clutchless shifting all the time. I paid $450 for the Corolla, and after I’d had it 3 years, I figured I’d gotten my money’s worth for it, so I might possibly be accused of having abused it. I do this stuff but rarely these days.
I don’t know that I have any particular signature move anymore, but here’s what one of my friends had to say about my driving:
Mr. Holzman always drives very fast, but it is
totally different than other people that drive fast. Usually there is an element of carelessness,
thoughtlessness, wandering attention, or reckless
abandon to fast driving. With Mr Holzman, it is the exact opposite, he is totally concentrated on the driving, and it is as if the faster he goes, the more intense is his concentration. He truly becomes one with the automobile and the road. The result is I feel safer driving with Dave than with almost anyone else.
I can judge a gap wide enough for my car from 10 car lengths away, to within a few millimeters. Just ask my passengers after they regain their voice.
Due to the nature of my work where time is money, I’ve become very adept at controlled dirt-road and two-track driving at high speeds in half-ton trucks.
I was going to recall driving around Ithaca, NY in a ’74 VW Dasher (!) with a faulty ignition switch, requiring that I hold the key between the “on” and “start” positions, while shifting and steering all those turns on the hills, but..
Really, I think double-clutching the ’47 Farmall was the best. I cringe with the memory.
Parallel park circles around me?
I learned to parallel park in San Francisco, with a ’80 Tercel – 5 speed, manual steering. Often had to park on hills, backing into the spot up a hill. Parking spaces weren’t exaclty easy to come by!
baabthesaab
You beat me to it. Long ago I had a 50 ford F-1 pickup, I put a 50 Olds V-8 in it and a crashbox 4 spd. That Olds had tons of torque and the truck was light with low gears. For what it was, it could fly. But the best part was the double clutching to shift. Gawd I loved that ugly truck.
I have 2 sweet moves:
1) Parallel parking. I got rather good at this when I was going to a gigantic university, and parking was scarce. My biggest feat was a 3″ (total, both sides) margin I worked into in about 2 swipes. I brought my friends out of their dorm room before dinner just to show them.
2) Predicting accidents. As a passenger, or a driver, I have a knack for saying “We’re about to get hit” with enough time for others in the car to say “huh?” right before the thunk. Visual cues help, but it’s more situational awareness that allows me to give some warning to other folks in the car.. I have been able to evade one (I mentioned it in the thread about using power to avoid accidents) due to paying attention while stopped.
My best move is looking left while throwing my left blinker on and then turning right (or vice versa), thus tricking surrounding drivers into blocking the path I don’t want and leaving my intended path wide open. I usually employ this while driving on crowded city streets as highway drivers are less inclinded to go out of their way to block me.
Also, I never make eye contact with anyone I intend to merge in front of or give them any indication I’m aware of their existence.
Compression start baby! Back in community college there were a few weeks where I wasn’t going to be able to afford a new battery, so I’d park at the top of hills, push the old 626 onto the slope, drop the clutch in second once we’d got up to speed, and pray the damn thing started before we got to the bottom.
The most exciting two weeks of my life.
I get to double clutch in my commuter. They syncros are worn down to nothing in my 4runner and I’m too cheap to get a rebuild. So I’ve gotten pretty good at double clutching.
I gotta say, some of these “signature moves,” like Brett Favre’s ability to throw outside of the passing pocket, aren’t actually positives but negatives in a lot of cases.
Sometimes it’s better to just stay in the pocket and take the sack instead of throwing wildly to make a play.
In fact, that was probably my best attribute when I was quarterbacking (I mean using the pocket, not the taking the sack part HA)… not sure how this translates into a driving skill though? Uhmm, how about I don’t swerve around wildly? Does that count as a signature move?
yak on the phone, smoke, eat a donut and shift all at once. That is disgusting in so many ways, eating and smoking, and I used to smoke.
Back in high school I could do something similar in my ’81 Honda Prelude without cup holders. I could drive without hands, steering and shifting at the same time witha cheeseburger in one hand, fries in the other and a large coke in my lap. Not possible with current cars ergonomics.
Caffiend I once parallel parked my grandfather’s Eagle something-or-other in the hills of Puerto Rico that had a broken e-brake, no power steering and a clutch that was basicly an on-off switch. Good times.
David Holzman Don’t we all get in the super concentration zone when we are driving really fast. all TTAC readers are great drivers
A TTAC track day would be a great gathering, or like the Car and Driver editor for a day thing, that would have been fun with you guys as opposed to the hearing “why is that SUV being driven so fast around the cones, I dont drive that way in real life why are they doing it”
Don Sherman used to challenge us to see who could go farther, late at night, without missing a single Bott’s Dot. He could do it all the way from Newport Beach to San Diego.
Driving in the rain without all-wheel drive makes me a Viking. According to recent Acura commercials I should just slide off into the nearest building without it.
Eating a Big mac, fries and a large coke while driving a manual transmission in Boston city traffic, without slowing down, missing a bite, spilling anything on my shirt/tie, missing a shift, or letting anyone cut in front of me.
Takes agility, hand-eye co-ordination, anticipation, agression, and nerves of steel.
The holy grail of sweet moves…..running out of gas while pulling up to the pump. The release of anxiety and feeling of accomplishment as the car sputters to a dead stop in perfect position next to the pump is priceless.
Situational awareness. I can predict which car is about to change lanes when (especially when they don’t put their turn signals), or to brake randomly, and all the other idiocies commuters do.
As it comes to parallel parking, my wife is leagues ahead of me, even though she grew up in Suburban NJ and me in a medieval city in Europe. Go figure…
I’m pretty good at clutchless shifting… I learned, of necessity, while trying to extend the life of the worthless clutch cable in a late ’70’s Monza (a car which featured the deceptively named ‘Iron Duke’ engine and died at 80K miles of a broken camshaft after 4 broken clutch cables and a slew of electrical problems).
I’m also pretty good at parallel parking. Partly, this stems from good choice of equipment; nothing beats the turning radius of a Volvo 240 (or its chassis-mates, makes the surprise U-turn a snap, too). I’ve never hit anything while doing it and I’ve earned quite few, “I was sure this wouldn’t fit” awards from surprised passengers.
When passengers are aboard, nothing livens things up like using the handbrake to help execute a turn.
Now, this isn’t a talent, exactly, but here in the Twin Cities, I merge whenever and wherever I want, in front of whoever I care to cut off. But this isn’t a talent of mnine, really. I learned to drive in the East and Minnesotans are usually far too timid to go head-to-head with someone who’s driven rush hours in the DC-PA-NJ-NY-CT-MA corridor. And I drive older cars.
Minnesotan’s special talent is to speed up to cut you off when you put on a blinker. I ignore this behavior and pull over when I’m ready, regardless, but I might start trying guyincognito’s trick, to see if it’s safer that way.
My favorites are e-brake 180s and powerslide 180s. I only do em in the rain or snow because I don’t feel like buying new tires every couple months. I’m good at seeing a line through traffic for about a half-mile ahead. I’m usually the first one through those highway traffic clots caused by left-lane lollygaggers.
I had to double clutch in my ’62 Falcon towards the end of its life. Probably because I’d done too much clutchless shifting. I figured out how to clutchless shift when I realized, during shifts from 2nd to 3rd, that I was pulling the shift lever into neutral before I was applying the clutch. I then just gently pushed it down, and it went into 3rd.
There was a road near where I used to live in DC that had a surface that would be fairly slippery when wet, that had a 60 or so degree turn. I’d yank the wheel in my old SL2, and go into a graceful, always highly controlled 4 wheel slide.
There was another road in a wooded area in a real high end part of town next to Rock Creek Park and close to downtown where the road went over a little brook about 3-4 times in close succession, and the bridges arched strongly. I’d floor the 1.2 liter ’77 Corolla to get (slightly) airborne. A blast.
Snow. I’m unstoppable in snow.
Autocross in the rain taught me nearly everything I needed to know about RWD in snow, too.
Traversing the entire length of my rather long gravel driveway in a full-on, high-speed four wheel drift that would make any WRC driver proud. This puts me in the proper alignment to drive straight into my garage, which sits at a 90-degree-angle to my driveway. (all this in a 90 HP Diesel car by the way)
My kids used to love being in the car when I did it, now that they are teenagers it scares them… go figure. My wife hates it because it makes a mess of the gravel. But man, is it fun!
I also have Parallel-Parking-Fu, high MPG-Fu, find-great-burger-joint-in-towns-i’ve-never-been-to-Fu, and make-slow-cars-go-fast-Fu. In the latter category I took a 1979 450sl (with a slush-box!) to a road course track day and beat a gaggle of Porsches, Corvettes, etc. I didn’t win outright, but came in 3rd ahead of some very respectable hardware and software (Drivers)… the Porsche guys were *pissed*. ;)
–chuck
http://chuck.goolsbee.org
Since moving to Atlanta I’ve developed a supernatural ability to detect when a car will suddenly and without warning attempt to enter the space my vehicle is currently occupying. Startles the passengers a bit (but then, suddenly braking and/or changing lanes does that) until they realize that I just narrowly avoided an accident. I can be in a long line of cars headed for an exit ramp, and predict exactly which car will dodge out of the exit lane at the last second (cutting across the median), and which cars will try to dodge in. And more than once I’ve hesitated that extra second at a green light and watched a car barrel through the intersection, running the red light and driving through right where I would have been had I started to make my turn.
when i was 6 or 7 and riding my bike on streets i thought i shouldn’t have to stop at stop signs if i was turning right because i could hug the curb and not have to worry if cars were coming or not.
I can defy the laws of friction, momentum and even gravity in my Impreza in the snow.