In a battered trailer parked at the edge of an abandoned runway choked in places with weeds, he joined a few other young people, including a long-legged blonde with a fetching smile and figure. He soon discovered she was already spoken for by ‘Baz,’ a swaggering gum-chewing lout in jeans with what his friend Zachary would have called a ‘bad attitude.’ Unlike all the others, he did not seem to be a student. A long-haired hippie type called Greg, apparently the project leader, brought them to order. “OK, dudes, listen up. We got a lot to cover here.” And they did. His ensuing address outlining the program gave seriousness to the project. A graphic film produced by an American safety council showed a grim procession of car wrecks, each the effect of impairment. A parade of statistics compiled from around the world of the cost in lives lost or shattered by drunken driving underlined the toll. This was followed by a ‘personality quiz’ which Matthew enjoyed filling out, an I.Q. test, a questionnaire on each person’s ‘recreational’ use of drugs and alcohol, and then a probing interview based on their responses to it from one of the project leader’s assistants. Matthew was an innocent. He had never smoked or injected anything himself, and described his use of alcohol as ‘moderate’ rather than ‘minimal,’ as he feared being disqualified from what seemed to him to have become a competition. At the next table Baz was bragging loudly about ‘weed, ‘uppers’ and ‘downers’; Matthew feared he himself was coming across as prim, proper, prudish and puritanical. Only recently had he succumbed to his father’s invitation to accompany his Christmas dinner with a glass of white wine, and celebrate New Year’s with a flute of champagne. He had never been to a bar or gone on a pub crawl. None of this seemed to matter to the interviewer, but Matthew saw his name being placed on a list headed ‘E.C.I’ for Estimated Consumption Intake, he assumed, very near the bottom. So this is how they were going to separate the sheep from the goats, he thought. How very sociological of them…
The next day Greg went up in Matthew’s estimation when he pushed Baz’s legs off his desk and sharply rebuked him for his ‘unprofessional’ attitude. It turned out Greg had been a U.S. Marine in the Vietnam War. After checking each guinea pig’s driver’s license, he led them outside and showed them the cars they were to drive around a circuit marked by bright orange traffic cones strategically laid out on the runway behind the trailer. The cars were all identical high-mileage Chevrolet Impalas, all the worse for wear, apparently vehicles surplus to military requirements. The course was a series of straight sections followed by curves at first both wide and gentle, and then disconcertingly narrow and sharp, with additional sweeping and switchback curves farther on, and a stop sign at a ‘crossroad.’ Drivers were asked to take the course without displacing the cones. This was easy at first, but then each driver’s completion of the course was timed. Matthew was exhilarated to discover he had by far the fastest time. The Impala, like all Detroit iron of the era, had been engineered for wide open spaces and for the power and comfort of its ‘boulevard ride.’ It was not designed for hairpin bends or narrow country lanes. Its clumsy recirculating ball power steering was by European rack and pinion standards inaccurate and mushy; the car wallowed heavily from side to side in curves, sliding its ungainly bulk sideways on its soft springs. Its braking was comically inadequate. Nevertheless, allowing for its inadequacies, Matthew enjoyed taking the circuit at speed. Finally, he could become Jackie Stewart or Mario Andretti. He particularly enjoyed watching Baz crash into a nest of cones on his entry to a tight curve. He was reminded of the Pirelli tire slogan “Power is nothing without control.”
