A friend of mine recently bought a new Corvette. I think he’s probably typical of many older guys who lusted for a Corvette when they were younger and can now afford the luxury. He also has a very understanding wife who was willing to sign on the dotted line for the $70,000 it takes to drive one of these beauties off the showroom floor.

An incentive to buy the car was a two-day course held at the Ron Fellows Performance Driving School. The school is staged at the Spring Mountain Motor Resort in Pahrump, Nevada where the original Optima Ultimate Street Car Invitational (OUSCI) was held for many years. My buddy was really excited to participate. If for no other reason, it offered a chance to push a new Corvette closer to his personal limits without fear of repercussions from a triple-digit highway speeding ticket.

We talked several times about what he could anticipate from the class since I took a similar four-day competition course when the Bob Bondurant School was still located at Sears Point in Northern California. That was many moons ago since Bondurant relocated in 1990 to Wildhorse Pass Motorsports Park south of Phoenix, in Chandler, Arizona.

Many people are under the mistaken impression that these schools teach you how to be an aggressive driver who then becomes a menace on the streets and highways. I can only speak from experience, but what I learned from my days with Bondurant (and several schools before and after) is entirely the opposite.

What these schools teach is a level of discipline inside the car that is all about vehicle control and – perhaps most important of all – an emphasis on vision. My opinion is that much of the problem of poor driving on the road today is directly affected by a lack of discipline. Too many people today have such a limited attention span that driving for more than a couple of minutes becomes a test of not whether they will be distracted by their cell phone or digital device, but rather how soon this will occur.

Just last week I was driving my V8 S10 pickup to meet a friend for lunch. I was sitting at a red light of a major four-lane boulevard in the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles. There were two cars in front of me and when our light turned green, the first two cars moved out and it came my turn to enter the intersection. A noise that sounded just like tires chirping from the heavy application of ABS made me look to my left to see this moron in a while Toyota nose-diving on the brakes as he blasted through the intersection aimed directly at my driver’s door about 15 feet away. I stomped on the throttle and was able to avoid him by a narrow margin. At that point, he was back on the throttle to escape the verbal assault he knew was coming.

After calming down from almost getting T-boned at 30 mph, my assumption was that he was either A) looking down at his cell phone while texting; B) an enthusiastic participant in the game to see how little attention he can pay to driving his car; or C) all of the above. My money is on C.

So when my friend said he was going to the Corvette driving school, I felt like here was at least one more person who will gain an appreciation for how hard it is to really drive fast with control even when other people would consider the car completely out of control.

After my friend returned from the school, he had to tell me about their three-lane driving test. This is where you enter an intersection where there are three separate lanes to choose from with signal lights above each lane. You enter the intersection at roughly 40 mph and as you enter, the instructor will trigger the lights to give you a green light over one lane while the other two are red. Your job is to react to the light, steer the car into the appropriate lane while simultaneously applying heavy braking. The goal is to stop before the car enters the opposite “crosswalk”. The distance is long enough that if you are good, you can complete the lane change and still stop in time.

Rarely are you given the opportunity to remain in a straight line, but it does happen so you have to be prepared. It’s also possible that all three lanes will go red and you have to stop before the crosswalk. When I did this test at Bondurant, our instructor told us “imagine your child is walking through the crosswalk – you don’t want to hit her!”

There are multiple goals within this exercise. The first is to test your vision and hand-eye-foot coordination to react to the light change. The second is intended to reveal that with ABS, you can commit to extremely heavy braking and still maintain control over the vehicle. In our class as well as my friend’s experience, very few were able to stop their car within the prescribed distance.

I told my friend that misinformed people think that once the ABS begins that this means that’s the most aggressive application of the brakes. This is a common misperception and indicative of how little people know about how to drive modern cars. The truth is that with all ABS cars that I’ve driven, the harder you stand on that brake pedal, the quicker the car will come to a complete stop. I told my friend to try and bend the brake pedal (you can’t) and not lift until the car comes to a complete stop.

This was where my friend was most excited because among the 15 students in his class, he was the only one to stop in the prescribed distance because he did what I suggested. The big win here wasn’t that he out-performed his fellow classmates, but that he truly now understands a little bit more about vehicle dynamics and how important ABS is to the average driver. Even more important is the point that in an emergency braking situation, ABS allows the driver to retain control over the vehicle to allow him to steer away from a potential collision. That takes some time to teach because most people panic in a potential emergency situation. It takes training to learn how to look where you want to go, brake, and steer for the escape route all in fractions of a second. It’s not easy.

That’s what the guy who almost hit me didn’t do. He had ABS because I heard the tires chirp, but he merely hit the brakes and steered straight for my door – as if he was aiming at me! That’s because he locked onto me as opposed to looking for an escape route. That decision should have been easy since from his perspective I was travelling from right to left, he should have aimed for the space behind me. A properly skilled driver would have hit the brakes and immediately turned the wheel to the right to aim for the space behind my truck that I just vacated.

Of course, the scary part is that the guy who ran the red light thinks he got away with something but even with our near miss he learned absolutely nothing. On the other hand, I’ve been reinforced that – except for a precious few – the majority of drivers in Los Angeles are poorly skilled, are more concerned with their cell phones than driving, and will succeed in crashing in greater numbers. I have to watch out for all of them.