CREATIVE CAR CONTROL WITH DON PALMER

Until this point, the six words I've always dreaded when out on a vehicle photo shoot were the casually dropped How about some tail out shots? the photographer asking for some action photographs of the car rounding the corner with the back end sliding. Enthusiast magazines thrive on this sort of picture, the driver holding the car in a perfectly controlled slide with an expression of sheer insouciance on his face. Trouble was, I was lousy at it. Expensively lousy too, as a £80,000 supercar wrapped around a Welsh Armco barrier would attest. Remedial help was required to avert a potential career ender.

Step forward Don Palmer, a driving coach who specialises in advanced car control. Hugely experienced as a tutor, Don's curriculum vitae also includes management of racing teams and direction of fleet training schemes. A small investment in training, Don indicated over a cup of coffee, could reduce the frequency that fleet drivers crash by a factor of four or more. The figures bore out his claims. The sort of driving we'd be undertaking, however, would likely cause any aspiring sales rep to be looking at a P45 before he exited the company car park.

Over a mug of coffee in the cafe at Bruntingthorpe Proving Ground, Don asked what I wanted from the day. It basically involved exploring the grey area that existed between a mere twitch from the back end of the car and a full-blown spin. Using a spacious section of Bruntingthorpe's two-mile runway would allow us plenty of space to explore the handling of the Vauxhall VX220 I'd brought with me as well as Don's rather special Noble M12 GTO-3R, a development car that was packing more than 400bhp. Driving out to our section of runway gave me the opportunity to consider quite what an odd place Bruntingthorpe is. Located a few miles out of Leicester, this old US Air Force base is temporary home to thousands of Vauxhalls, Fords and Peugeots that await delivery on the taxiways as well as all manner of esoteric aeronautica, much of which will never again leave the ground. Hawker Hunters, an Avro Vulcan, even an AeroSpacelines Super Guppy transporter sit around in various states of oxidization. For an anorak like me, this would be worth the price of admission alone.

As Don coned off a tight course, I chatted to Rob Rackstraw, a veteran of Don's 'The Wetter the Better' course and a...