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Precious Cargo: A Day at Nanny Driving School
Here's a clever variation on the driver training theme taught by Jason Holehouse.
From the April issue of Car and Driver Magazine
At upstate New York’s Monticello Motor Club, “domestic” usually refers to the Cadillac-supplied CTS-Vs—the mega-Caddy is the official car of the track. But today, area nannies and housekeepers are getting domestic help rather than giving it at a new driving school designed to safeguard their employers’ young en route to private school and cello lessons. (Hey, it beats vacuuming Cheerios out of the seats on a weekend morning.)
Ari Straus [pictured above], president of the private, 3.6-mile road course, kept hearing club members complaining about the help: always dinging the family Mercedes or Porsche while chauffeuring kids or running errands. Now, a one-percenter might be thinking: Silly domestics! These handmaidens to the children of the masters of the universe don’t even have experience driving large performance sedans and SUVs on unfamiliar roads or in northern weather! Straus confirms: “Some of these women have never seen snow before.” Throw in Manhattan, whose gnarled traffic and gnarlier cabbies could make Sebastian Vettel whimper, and the club’s Child Caretaker Program was born.
Club members pay $500 (nonmembers pay $1000) for the day of classroom and track exercises, with materials in English or Spanish. Firefighters or police officers cover what to do if you’re in an accident and teach students how to install child seats. “The class is really for anyone who has little lives at stake in the back seat,” Straus says. At the program we attend, students include Gladys Castro and her employer, Mary Kate Delattre, a mother of two girls in suburban Connecticut. Jason Holehouse, Monticello’s chief instructor, leads the classroom session on driving strategies and safety, where the women’s eyes glaze over during a technical discussion of contact patches and cornering forces. Holehouse hones in on the mistakes the average driver makes in an emergency: “Most people end up using only a small percentage of their cars’ actual abilities,” he says. And the ladies perk up during Holehouse’s pre-track pep talk that notes their genetic edge over the typical, overconfident male rookie: “You’re much better at driving with finesse and not upsetting the car,” he says hopefully, just before the women hit the track for a series of car-control exercises.
Castro tackles a slalom in her dusty Nissan Sentra, with Delattre following in a new silver Range Rover. “She’s a very cautious driver,” Delattre says of her Dominican housekeeper. That becomes clear during the emergency-lane-change exercise, which Castro initially executes without brushing either an orange cone or 15 mph—a speed attainable by any Brooklyn nanny with a designer stroller. But the calm pace, she says, serves her well on New York’s mean streets, which she insists are safer than the Dominican Republic’s: “They drive so crazy in my country.”
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You draw 'em a picture and they eat the crayons... (Duck Waddle commenting on the creative ways some people interpret driving instruction.)
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04-18-2012
"Think very carefully, because if you ever start, you will never be able to leave it alone" Sir Donald Campbell, CBE
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