Performers Bottom Line
Go for it— great skill to have, good pay and fun; helps if you’re athletic, like measured risk, and have both the time and can borrow someone else’s access to a vehicle for practice.


Overview
I often get asked about my precision driving background— you know that “Professional Driver, Closed Course” text at the bottom of commercials— and how one gets training and experience in that field. While I’d have to say that IMO it is quite a rush and pays well, like many smaller professions it’s also quite a small, specialized field and largely based on real-world experience and recommendations, reputation, and referrals (probably because they want to know who’ll be driving a big car, fast and right next to them). But there are definitely resources out there on how to get started; hit the links section below to check those, or keep reading for more background.


What It Is
Probably best to first say what I feel from my experience precision driving is not— it’s not really racing, stunt driving, or having a regular driver’s license, although those often overlap and being good in those (as well as having a valid license) can and does help. I would generally define it as, “The ability to safely, accurately, and repeatedly place a moving vehicle in and around other stationary or moving objects for on-camera production.”

Sounds basic, but basically summed up as performance driving with a high degree of safety, accuracy, and repeatability. Safety— getting a vehicle from A to B has to be done with (obviously) no, or as little, collateral damage to people and property in order to save production funds (& lives). Accuracy— in the production world, time is also money, and fewer takes means saving both. Repeatability— like any performer hitting one’s mark on stage or film, it’s important to be able to reliably reproduce the same vehicle movement to the same location over and over and over again depending upon the director’s needs. Depending on those needs and other production requirements, drivers can often be required to perform the exact same course over and over again without fatigue or losing concentration.

I’d also add that precision driving is as much skill/art as it is pure physics, because it takes experience and some degree of sensitivity to accurately predict vehicle movement over a variety of ever changing terrain; e.g., things like changing weather and even the change of tire air pressure/temperature from repeated runs can effect a vehicle’s behavior from one moment to the next. Those aspects can be understood (and even measured) in the general sense, but in the end it’s at least as much about the feel a driver has for that vehicle and in those conditions based on their own training and experience with something similar.


Links/Resources
Disclosure: My personal background is off-road driving, for things like training films and SUV commercials, and most of the links here will reflect that bias, but you should know there are many different subsets (high-speed, low-speed, off-road, on-road, etc). For instance, although I can and do high-speed street driving work as well, it does have different requirements so you should first determine what type of driving you’re interested in before investing in specific training. Also note that my training came from international competition, expedition, and working with SUV manufacturers domestically and internationally for a number of years, and therefor I haven’t used many of the links below myself and can’t verify their training. But I’ll try to only include ones with good reputations and add my own comments for verification where appropriate.

• What is precision driving anyway? Excellent overview by Ron Dexter circa 2004
• Training local to New York:
  • Volvo school (in PA near Pocono Racetrack; I have to check status/reputation)
  • Paragon Adventure Park (in PA; not sure what they have so I have to check latest status/reputation)

• Training nationwide:
  • Land Rover Experience (domestic and international; checked and verified)
  • VT Rally School (in VT, I need to get link and info from Kevin/K2)
  • Bill Burke (in UT; I have to check reputation)
  • Collin McRae (out west; I need to get more info)

• Teams/Facilities for Hire
  • Drivers, Inc.

• Other
• Answers.com search for “precision driving”
• my driving 101 page from Trekken days (for off-road driving)
• Wikipedia— I’ll see about creating a Wiki entry since one doesn’t exist yet