Drivers acting Like Trout

One of the odd things certain drivers do is following another vehicle closely through an overtaking manoeuvre. Take any busy road, start to overtake, and chances are someone else will pull out to make it a team event. What stimulates this seems to be the response of a trout going after a fly, the same thing that makes a motorist want to overtake the car in front, even if they are moving at the same speed. This triggers another common behaviour, the driver of the car being passed speeding up to keep up with the person who passed them. The process can go on for a while, even to the point that if for some reason this person is forced to drop behind, they will come speeding up to resume station. It often requires a distraction to get rid of them, such as getting a couple of cars in between.

We do these things because we have done them often before and gotten away with them. The problem is that in terms of risk assessment, having done something a thousand times doesnt mean it was right, just that the person was lucky. This overtaking behaviour is both annoying and unsafe. I am not so lonely that I crave that kind of bonding, and it cuts out a lot of options in case of crisis. That could triggered by the lead car suffering a puncture, the engine stalling, a deer or dog in the road, or an alien spaceship landing. The point is that somewhere, as you are reading this, one of those things is happening, with the possible exception of the spaceship. It makes little sense to wander the highways in the blissful belief that nothing will go wrong.

In racing, we follow another driver closely partly to be able to pass, but largely to force that person into making a mistake. When the other driver is watching the mirrors too much, driving precision might suffer from the distraction. However, as anyone who has watched a race will realise, if the lead driver suddenly slows there is a fair chance of getting collected by those behind. Not much fun, and less so on the street. Recently on the news, there was a report of a two hundred car crash somewhere in the United States. That is an astonishing figure, but thirty car pileups seem fairly common. Getting caught in this would be as much fun as a train wreck.

Overtaking of any sort involves a degree of vulnerability, even on multi-lane roads. Doing the tandem pass on a two-lane road is the equivalent of standing in a valley between two mountains, during a snowstorm, and hoping there wont be an avalanche.

Alan Sidorov is an experienced automobile racer, development tester and automotive journalist. He has lived in five different countries, and travelled extensively beyond that. Alan runs Sidorov Advanced Driver Training, in Whistler, British Columbia. The website is http://www.spdt.ca

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