SLOW DOWN, YOU'RE GOING TOO FAST (AND OTHER THINGS I LEARNED ON MY SPEED-AWARENESS COURSE)

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Being detained at His Majesty’s pleasure can have a potent effect on the creative juices, as the jailbird accounts of writers from Oscar Wilde to Jeffrey Archer make clear. When I was in hot water over a traffic matter and looking at a three-stretch — three hours on a speed-awareness course — I surprised myself by coming up with a movie pitch. It’s Fast & Furious (the gas-guzzling, tyre-shredding, points-accumulating franchise) meets The Usual Suspects. We open with the police nicking a bunch of speed merchants and banging them up together to face the music. But instead of taking part in an ID parade like Keyser Söze and co, this mob meet on a course like the one I was going to attend. Hugh Grant continues his brilliant run of playing against type as a Deliveroo driver with a motorbike and sidecar. We meet him after officers pull over what appears to be a fast-moving Jenga of pizzaboxes. There’s a homage to Benny Hill from Vinnie Jones as London’s last working milkman, whose float is souped up by his boy-racer nephews and caught doing a ton on the Westway. A bent copper (Helen Mirren) has thrown a dragnet over the city to trap these road runners as she’s secretly putting together a crew of elite drivers, perhaps for a bank job or kidnapping.

Put it down to nerves, but I was storyboarding this road movie in my head on the morning of my course. A camera clocked me doing 26mph in one of the 20mph zones which are almost everywhere in London now (cheers, Sadiq!). Because I had a clean licence, and wasn’t too far over the speed limit, I was offered the opportunity of taking a class with the prospect of no further action — ie. no points — if I said yes. To reinforce the message about watching my horsepower, I had to pony up £92 and make sure I didn’t bunk over the wall or otherwise go AWOL during the session. Nine of us errant motorists, from all corners of the capital and the Home Counties, assembled first thing on a Monday under the tutelage of an instructor called Jackie. (Not her real name: if you are a speed-awareness instructor who happens to be called Jackie, apologies for any confusion.) “I also do the naughty class, but you’re not on that one today,” Jackie assured us. Was there a separate regime for the hard cases, I wondered, the tearaways and the TWOC-ers? By contrast, we were the sort of drivers who, in the days before speed cameras, might have expected a highway-patrol officer to rest a lugubrious forearm on the windowsill and say, “Now then, Nigel Mansell, we’re a long way from Monza, aren’t we?” That said, we were told that further speeding by any of us in the next three years would automatically incur points.

What sort of things might lead us to go over the limit, asked Jackie. With moist palms, I thought of the slaloming SUVs of the North Circular, alternately tailgating and undertaking, so that a man driving his boy to a football match was at a loss to avoid them without putting his foot down (though it was on a quieter road that I was pinched). Stress is a significant factor in speeding: stress at being late, stressful in-car conversations. One of my fellow lags said that losing his licence would mean his wife would become the family’s designated driver, “which I might find even more stressful, to be honest”.

Jackie showed us a selection of motoring environments and invited us to say which speed limit applied in each case. It turns out that a parade of street lights announces a 30mph zone as unobtrusively as a row of flunkies murmuring the name of a new arrival at a royal garden party. You could be forgiven for not knowing that, I thought. At least, I hoped you could.

We learnt that even a modest excess of speed over the prescribed maximum could have significant repercussions. Making an emergency stop at 50mph, you travel approximately 15 metres before your brain tells your left foot to hit the brake and 53 metres before you come to a halt. If you’re going at 55mph instead, you’re still moving at 23mph after 53 metres. Most crashes happen on urban roads, because they’re the busiest, but country routes are the deadliest. The time it takes for an accident to be reported and an ambulance dispatched runs down the clock on the “golden hour”, the first 60 minutes after a serious injury in which medics can optimise your odds of pulling through. At the last count, said Jackie, 1,721 people were killed on Britain’s roads in a year — getting on for five a day — and 25,208 were seriously injured.

Back to my screenplay-in-progress, and there’s a smoking handbrake turn in the third reel. We discover that Mirren isn’t a rogue cop at all but some kind of mystic or adept of health and safety. She wants her racers to go straight and set an example to the drivers of tomorrow. They fan out to moonlit bypasses and supermarket carparks where the kids are pulling doughnuts. After a couple of wheelies to get their attention, Hugh Grant tells them he’s haunted by a fatal RTA involving his father, a rep who preferred his car to his own family (an award-winning cameo from Tom Conti). The youngsters are taking in what Hugh has to say. A short time later, we see him rattling along under a stack of pizzas again —only this time the camera pulls back to find him on the backseat of a London bus. Credits.

When The Fast & Furious Suspects comes out, I’ll go along to the press junkets with Hugh and Vinnie and Helen, just to make sure the message gets across: watch your speed. But I’ll let the stars do the talking. If there’s one thing my awareness course has made me aware of, it’s to stay in your lane.

Stephen Smith is a freelance writer and a former correspondent for The BBC's Newsnight. This piece appears in the Summer 2024 issue of Esquire. Subscribe here

2024-07-03T10:41:26Z dg43tfdfdgfd