Pro Driver Shows Off Tactical Driving Techniques | Tradecraft | WIRED

any of this hit maneuver stuff in j-turns and high-speed backing if you're using any of those skills you've done something probably really silly or just gotten into it all hornet's nest at trouble all of a sudden [Music] my name is Wyatt Knox and I'm the special projects director here at the team O'Neil Riley school I've been instructing professionally high speed driving high risk driving for over a decade now so I started rallying when I was 18 or 19 years old and I do a few a year 2012 I did the entire national US Championship but I won two-wheel drive the definition of rally racing getting from point A to point B quickly with the vehicle still running underneath you is basically the definition of tactical driving tactical mobility in a nutshell is basically having excellent car control so that if something happens you know you're capable of handling your vehicle and its occupant safely and also being able to respond to other potential happenings depending on what sort of a mission you might be involved in for the most parts of the folks that we put through these types of courses here at the rally school are with the United States and friendly governments venturing into special operations folks we spend a lot of time in some pretty rough places around the world disclaimer a lot of the stuff that we're doing here on our private 600 acre facility hidden away in the mountains of New Hampshire is training folks for high risk environments overseas it's definitely not for the roads of America and that sort of thing tactical mobility the way that we train it here getting really really good car control in all different kinds of vehicles and then introducing some of the offensive and defensive skills that you might need so this car is a Ford Crown Victoria it makes a really excellent training platform for us because it's representative of so many heavy American rear-wheel drive automatic vehicles that are commonly used by you know security professionals a rear-wheel drive car like this when you accelerate the rear tire spin and the back end of the car swings all over the place so it's really good for training and getting into a bunch of skids and sliding around and learning how to handle that we do weld on these big heavy duty steel bumpers so that we can run into each other without doing so much damage but they've got good suspension and really thick wheels and tires and stuff from the factory we have snow tires on this one you can see it's met some the other cars and then we just do the the big steel bumpers in the back alright so we're gonna set up a course out here take this car out and run through some representative scenarios that you might find out in the real world alright so a j-turn is essentially just a reverse 180 you're gonna use a j-turn if you're driving along down the road and up ahead for whatever reason you see something you don't like you'd much rather be going the other direction quickly j-turns it's kind of a Hollywood movie you see it a ton in the action movies and TV shows and that kind of thing it's not something that you know a lot of people are really gonna use operationally overseas especially if you're in you know an armored SUV are you gonna do a j-turn no it's gonna flip over if you're in a congested urban area are you gonna do a j-turn no you're gonna run into something but if you've got enough area and you've deemed hey we need to be going backwards at high speed right now the more tools you have in the toolbox that better off you're gonna be come to a full and complete stop get it into reverse back up we usually give it the count of three so one two three let off the throttle and turn add a little bit of brake and you can get the car to snap around nice and quick while it's rotating engaged drive straighten the wheel and get out of there the pit maneuver is basically a pursuit technique when you need the vehicle that is in front of you to either get out of your way or come to a stop it's necessary to do that by doing as little harm to your own vehicle as possible here comes looks like in order for the police to use it it's considered use of deadly force here in America so unless whatever that person has done warrants that you're not gonna see that but you will see it you know very commonly overseas you can do a pit maneuver on either side of the vehicle the reason that most folks in the United States you know the police departments used to train match your left front to their right rear because it's easier for the driver and you're spinning them away from oncoming traffic for police Department use say this is your target vehicle for a PIT maneuver kind of this sweet spot that you're going for is right in this area right here if you're too far to the back chances are you'll just damage the car without actually spinning it out enough and if you get up into the wheel and that sort of thing you're gonna do a lot of damage to your own vehicle and it might not work out so well you're following a vehicle lagging behind when you decide it's time drive up quickly match your left front with their right rear make contact turn in and accelerate and if you do it just right and drive through them that cars gonna spin out and even for an expert it's not going to be recoverable and they'll be spun around and stopped a much more useful skill and than being super good at j-turns is actually just being able to backup at high speed if you're an urban environment you need to back around you know back through traffic and park vehicles you're not gonna be doing j-turns when you're backing up a lot of the engineering that's gone into making your car perform the way that it does is working against you whenever you're in Reverse your car's rear steer if your cars rear-wheel drive and now it's front-wheel drive even the way that the brakes work and everything else cars are not designed to drive quickly backwards and most drivers are just not great at it the easiest sneaky trick is to get your left arm over the seatbelt brace your left foot kind of over where the dead pedal might be and turn yourself around in the seat you know as much as possible and my hand is at what would be 12 o'clock if the wheel were straight I'm not very good at high-speed backing I will need one more time good you've got to be good with your mirrors and so hopefully you've got them adjusted and you've got a little bit of wherewithal and it's not that tricky it's nice you got both hands on the wheel washing your left side and your right side and backing through you know traffic or around some obstacles and the best thing you can do is get backed into a side street or an alleyway or something like that get it into drive so you can really get some speed up and get out of there if you're ever the passenger in a vehicle and for whatever reason the driver becomes incapacitated to the pourer they're no longer able to operate that vehicle anymore somebody's diabetic or if they're prone to seizures or anything like that that's where hopefully you've practiced the driver down drill you're in the passenger seat something happens and you realize that the driver is no longer able to operate the vehicle appropriately first step is get your belt off and reach across to grab the handle on the door not the handle it opens it but like the safety handle and that'll just help kind of hold them in position while you scoot over basically sweep their legs out of the way and you're going to be operating the pedals with your left foot only and the steering wheel with your right hand on the way that we train it is yeah you've actually got to get through some exercises like that so that you're pretty capable and you can make it around a few turns and then get the vehicle to a stop some of the folks that are headed overseas to pretty hostile environments will train the same drill but with you know three men in the car four men in the car the driver down drill at that point turns into passenger takes control rear seat gets the driver out do what you can for them passenger moves completely into the driver's seat car continues driving most drivers out there on the street are probably just okay driving around with perfectly normal kind of unaltered vehicles but it's good to be able to do some of these things and to go through this training and have those skills and know how to prepare vehicles so that if for some reason you do need to just drive at the limit or get through some different situations you've got those skills personally when I'm looking for a vehicle I either select an older vehicle that doesn't have ABS in traction control and that sort of thing or at least an older vehicle it's usually easy to disable you know in this two thousand two or three Subaru I can pull a fuse or two and in about thirty seconds we're analog no electronics ready to go have a good time slide around corners basically driving with ABS and traction control is like swimming with a life jacket on you know it's really easy to swim and you can swim around just fine but abs and traction control limit your car's performance a dramatic amount on a slippery road you can't really stop that well you can't get uphill sometimes it can be frustrating but abs and traction control and also stability control they're all wonderful systems and they've definitely saved lives so the first time you approach an unfamiliar vehicle there's kind of a little checklist that you can do even if you just have a second look at one side or do a quick walk around number ones always going to be tires what kind of condition are they in do they have air in them or do they have tread so a winter tires much softer rubber like a pencil eraser almost you can hit it with your thumb and kind of squish it around and that's what you're looking for in very cold temperatures to stay stuck to the road just gauging the tire pressure usually you can give it just the thumb test is just pushing in on the middle of the sidewall and you should get you know a quarter inch of deflection or so too hard is not really a problem if it's too soft it'll overheat and you'll have a blowout if a car like this might be strange to you get yourself in get your seat in your steering wheel properly adjust it and adjust your mirrors it's really this silly stuff that ends up biting people the mirrors haven't been adjusted or you don't know where the wipers are and you hit a big mud puddle and then you're turning the headlights on and whacking the stereo and trying to figure it all out and it really only takes 30 seconds to a minute of sitting in a car make yourself kind of happy with it and you're good to go so we've got here is a Subaru WRX it's an all-wheel-drive turbocharged car we don't have any ABS or traction control active on this it's fully analog we're gonna take this car put it through its paces and a few exercises out here at the rallies cool most of the skills that we're teaching here at the rally school are rally based skills the Scandinavians came up with left foot breaking for the most part using left foot braking in front-wheel drive cars to get around corners faster doing the pendulum turns you know it's called the Scandinavian flick by most people's intentionally chucking the car sideways to get around corners they were really the early masters of this kind of car control and it's developed since then as cars have gotten a little better and tires and suspensions have gotten a little better there's more kinds of racing that have used left foot braking now basically everybody's doing you know there's a lot of different reasons for left foot braking the first one is always just gonna be reaction time being able to get to the brake very quickly lets you drive a lot faster a lot more safely one of the other main reasons for left foot braking is to be able to control the weight of the car part of what you're doing is putting weight on the front to help the car turn and if the backend slides around because of that you need to put weight on the back for stability and that's what you're doing with your right foot on the throttle and your left foot on the brake is just transferring weight smoothly to the front and smoothly to the rear there's a common misconception in the world right now that a skidding car is out of control because if you schedule crash and the truth is there's a huge amount of gray area in there where you're skidding around and you're sliding a car but you're well under control and that's really where you're getting the most performance out of you know any vehicle you watch a dirt bike they're always spinning tires and locking tires up and sliding around corners it's the same with cars it's just people have forgotten how to do it and most people were never taught how to do it and now most cars come with systems that don't even allow you to do it one really important skill to have if you're traveling to these high risk environments is to be able to move other objects and/or vehicles out of your way as necessary if you need to breach a barricade with a vehicle or get through some kind of roadblock the most important thing is knowing where the strong points on your car and those are gonna be your two frame rails in the front sometimes they're closer together or further apart or higher up or lower down and you're gonna want to line those up directly with whatever it is you're trying to move out of the way with a vehicle blocking the road you're gonna line up one of your frame rails with the rear wheel of the vehicle that you're trying to move if you happen to see that it's a pickup truck that's fraida down in the back sure go for the front whichever end looks lighter usually it's the back of that's where you're gonna want to square up with and push out of the way and if you can manage to hit that rear wheel with your frame rail you're just gonna break that contact patch with the ground of those rear wheels and push that car out of your way very easily without doing really any damage to your own car be aware in a normal car your airbags are gonna go off the fuel pump might shut off and you're now gonna be stranded right in the worst possible situation just having done something really stupid most vehicles that are kind of fleet supplied to the folks that we work with that are going overseas that stuff's all deactivated really the baseline of all of the training that we do here is car control and that comes from just spending hours sliding cars around and learning where the roads limits and your own limits and different vehicles limits all exist and it just gives you a tremendous amount of capabilities to get in and out perform 90 something percent of normal drivers that might be out there on the road [Music] making decisions based on what you're presented with is one way to exercise your mind and learn how to pay attention to the small things that was a special agent with the FBI my job was to catch spies retired Navy SEAL 21-years combat experience and now at crisis management professional I've been instructing professionally high-speed driving with the United States and from the government if you take the time to evaluate walking or driving that same route every day you just reduced the number of things you have to pay attention to when something bad occurs

Channel: WIRED

Views: 1,404,889

Rating: 4.9214854 out of 5

Keywords: driving, tactical driving, team o'neil rally, u turn, tactical mobility, tradecraft, pit maneuver, how to do a pit maneuver, how to drive backwards, driving backwards, backwards driving, tactical driving techniques, special operations personnel, pit maneuver driving, wyatt knox, wyatt knox driver, pro driver, professional driving, professional driver, tradecraft wired, wired tradecraft, wired, tactical, j turn, how to do a j turn

Id: L3cQFsX6gl4

Length: 15min 7sec (907 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 29 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/PastelFlamingo150]

Safety features are bad when you want to be unsafe.

[u/Thank_Mimes]

👆Guess who got a rental car today!

[u/FlapjackHatRack]

Very informative presentation.

[u/doctorcain]

Awesome video, I love shit like this. Makes me miss my Subaru.