Backroads and BMWs

The Chris’s, myself, Noah, and a few others from NeXeT signed up for a high-speed evasive and combat driving course as a team-building exercise.

It ran every weekend for a few months.

Chris had just bought himself a brand new BMW M5 and loved to drive it fast. He was constantly bragging about how fast he could drive it at night, and how many cops he outran.

He was a weird guy.

Chain-smoked constantly, but anytime we hung out at his house for video game night, we were under strict orders not to tell his wife.

“She doesn’t know,” he’d say. “She hates smokers.”

She knew.
There’s no covering that smell up.
I’d been around enough smokers to know.

Pot, though? That was just fine.
Hell, she’d take huge bong rips and could smoke out the best of us.

But that driving class? That was something else.

The final weekend was a simulated live-fire event.

Instructors used rubber bullets and would shoot at us while we were driving.
We used beat-up Ford hatchbacks to maneuver through obstacle courses and barricades.

“Ass of the car first,” they taught us.
“Unless it’s a Porsche—then it’s all ass anyway.”

It was chaotic.
It was fun.
It was incredibly dangerous.

We had to sign so many waivers. Not just at the beginning of the course, but every single day. There were crashes and injuries, but thankfully there were no fatalities during our course work.

Of course, now emboldened with my newly acquired tactical driving skills, I started driving more recklessly than ever.

There was this one stretch of mountain road we’d use.
Twisty, rural, no driveways, no cross streets. Perfect.

We’d block it off: one truck at the top, one at the bottom.
Then we’d take turns driving Chris’s M5 in two-person teams. One to call out the turns, and one to actually make them. We’d race up the hill, swap seats, and race back down.

I’d whip that car around 20 mph bends doing 140.
Back end sliding, nose of the car grazing the inside line, downshift, snap correction, a moment of handbrake just in time for the next turn.

No going off cliffs this time. Just adrenaline flowing speeds at the edge of what physics allowed.

We ran the uphill in just under 6 minutes.
The downhill in just under 5.

One night, not even on our backwoods circuit, just driving fast on a main road with Chris.
We saw the blue lights of a state trooper flip on as we blew past him.

“Fuck,” I said to Chris, who was driving.

He just laughed.

He had someone install a rotating license plate, among other goodies.

He pushed a hidden wooden panel in the console, revealing four buttons:

Go. Flip. Smoke. Ouch.

“I’ve been waiting to try this out,” he said, grinning like a maniac.

Chris slowed a bit, letting the trooper close the distance.

“Smoke,” he said.

“No thanks,” I replied. “You know I don’t do that.”

We both chuckled as I hit the button.

Almost immediately, thick white smoke started billowing from the exhaust.

“Pumps mineral oil into the catalytic converter,” he explained.

Then I hit Flip The audible Clunk as the license plate rotated was barely noticeable over the roar of the engine.

I glanced at the Ouch button.
Bright red.

“You’ll like that one,” Chris said.

I pressed it.
There was a metallic clatter behind us.

“Caltrops,” he said.

“Fuck me. You really built a James Bond car,” I told him.

Chris hit Go, and I got slammed back into the seat.

“Nitrous, baby!” he howled, laughing like a madman.

The trooper hit the spikes and veered off the road.

We passed 150 mph again, smoke billowing out from behind the car filling the black night around us.

I miss the bravado of driving that fast, and as I look back I’m amazed that none of us crashed that BMW or somehow got ourselves arrested or worse for the way we drove.