It’s called the skidpad.
With good reason.
Nothing will put your heart in your mouth faster than peeling through this patch of water-slicked asphalt at a high rate of speed.
With a teenager behind the wheel. It’s all in the name of safe driving. No, really.
One after another, 16 teens — divided into different retired police squad cars — take turns behind the wheel, zooming across the wet pavement, whipping between traffic cones and then dealing with the resulting skid. They’ll do it again and again and again.
This is START, Safe Teen Accident Reduction Training.
The program aims to teach teen drivers how to avoid traffic collisions and be safer behind the wheel.
“If they can stay in control, they’ll be OK,” says David Rencken, a police officer who’s been a driving instructor since 1996 and with START from the get-go.
On this Saturday morning at the Southern Arizona Law Enforcement Training Center, a group of teens reported for duty at the very unadolescent-friendly hour of 7 a.m. for the five-hour, hands-on driver-training program. For 60 minutes, they’ll sit in a classroom, learning about vehicle dynamics, DUI laws and the importance of avoiding distractions, like texting at the wheel.
“Driving is a full-time task — that’s what we’re trying to get across,” Rencken says.
A newly licensed driver’s biggest challenge is inexperience, Rencken says.
That’s why getting kids onto a track and teaching them techniques to avoid collisions does more than just serve up some helpful tips — it can be lifesaving.
Traffic crashes are the leading cause of death for teens ages 16 to 19, according to the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety statistics. In 2013 in Arizona, 80 were killed and 5,641 were injured.
The heart of START — a collaborative effort between the Tucson Police Department and the nonprofit Tucson Police Foundation — is the lengthy behind-the-wheel training with police driving instructors showing new licensees how it’s done. In fact, the kids are put through the same paces as law-enforcement recruits, just at much lower speeds. Police trainees run through drills at 75 or 80 mph, while the teens are cruising at 35-45 mph, which still seems wicked fast when you’re gunning around a real-life Hot Wheels loop and then being told at the last possible second to veer left or right before stopping fast enough to avoid wiping out a wall of traffic cones.
The teens have the run of a 10.5-acre track. Along two edges, there are long stretches marked by traffic cones, one for practicing braking at high speed, while the other is for off-road training. A maze of traffic cones marks out a course for reverse driving. Water shoots up into the center of the blacktop to simulate hydroplaning.
Not the kind of stuff easily practiced in the family minivan, which is exactly why Leslie Garry sent her 16-year-old daughter, Mattison. She’d heard about the program even before Mattison got her license. “I would recommend it to every parent I know,” Garry says.
“I can’t teach her that stuff. It’s such a community service.”
Mattison, a Sahuaro High School student, got her license in January.
“It was really cool,” she says of the training. “I thought I had a better understanding, but I wasn’t prepared for what we were doing.”
Many insurance companies, like State Farm, offer discounts to teen drivers who complete the START program. State Farm, which supports the program through company and individual agent donations, offers a discount of up to 11 percent on coverage, said agent Stu Lewis.
Rencken urges teens to come back as many times as they want. In fact, he encourages it. He uses the analogy of a professional baseball player going through daily batting practice.
“If you’ve been playing baseball for 20 years, you know how to hit a baseball,” he says.
Still, that player needs practice, Rencken adds — just like new drivers.
