I Learned To Drive Like The World’s Toughest Special Agents At The Craziest Track I’ve Ever Seen

Earlier this year I got an exclusive invite to experience something few civilians ever do: a chance to train like a special agent at a facility where you usually need security clearance to see. For a professional race car driver and enthusiast, it’s a dreamland, full of cars from around the world and seemingly endless miles of pristine race track without a marshall or official in sight. But what’s a dream for me, actually exists to train diplomats and agents for every possible nightmare scenario.

When I was a kid, like many young boys, I dressed up as an Army man – infatuated by the idea of heroic feats of battle and representing the country I pledged allegiance to each morning before class. Looking back, it’s a bit odd to want to be in the Army because, as you grow up, you realize the seriousness of it all. Politics aside, by its very nature war is humans killing other humans. 

As I got older – as recently as last week – I realized I’d rather be more like James Bond. 

But even with that, like many, I still love a good war film or show, and I’ve always wondered what it would be like to undergo the training of a Navy SEAL, fighter pilot, or secret agent without having to actually be a Navy SEAL, fighter pilot, or secret agent. I’ve realized I’m not cut out for such a thing, given that I get flustered in the middle seat of a plane and have a low tolerance for being shot at.

This is why I have immense respect and admiration for everyone in the armed forces. In my line of work, I meet many of them, and I make it a point to always say, “Thank you for your service.” I often can’t help but think about how they bravely put themselves in harm’s way by choice and how close their mothers or fathers are to potentially getting that terrible call.

Being a million times less brave, I’ve often wondered what it would be like just to do their training. Is that part fun? Well, two months ago, I got a text from Matt Hardigree. We don’t do much small talk. When he texts me, something is up. This text was just a picture of a Google Maps shot of what looked to be one of the largest and most insane racetracks I have ever seen. I quickly responded, “I have no idea what this is, but I am in.”

Little did I know this was no racetrack but a training facility for a special government agency that needs this track-like facility because they are probably the most elite and experienced drivers in all of America’s security apparatus. They are the Diplomatic Security Service or DSS for short – much like the Secret Service but with one big difference: They are constantly in hostile territory. 

Their missions also primarily require them to drive in civilian areas and, at a moment’s notice, be ready to become Max Verstappen or Kyle Busch, but at the helm of a very heavy armored suburban, Land Rover, Land Cruiser, or any of the numerous vehicles used by our diplomats abroad (more on that later).

The best bodyguards in the world need the best training facility, and so they go to a remote corner of Virginia called the Foreign Affairs Security Training Center, or FASTC. There are 19 miles of race tracks and roads, a full cloverleaf overpass, acres of unimproved roads, broken bridges. Fake downtowns.

Think of it like a racing school for James Bond.

I couldn’t wait to fulfill a dream.

The Only Driving School With Guns

Above is the video of what happened, which you can also watch here. Please watch it!

If you were a normal student, you would start in the classroom with a whiteboard that has a ginormous visual of the track. But being in the media and for the sake of time, I assured them with my racing background, I knew exactly what I was getting into. A couple of instructors were NASCAR fans and knew of my latest racing crashes – I had street cred. So we jumped directly into the driving!

As you will see in the video we filmed, the training starts like a mix of police academy and racing school drills. My instructor would be the top dog when it comes to DSS driving instructors – Mark Perkins. He was a spitting image of Alec Baldwin, so much so that I looked up where Alec Baldwin was during our time there. He has a racing background and competed in Autocross for years. He got this job when, by chance, an armed forces group was using Summit Point Raceway for a training exercise when he was there. He volunteered to help, and the next thing he knew, this was his full-time occupation.

He also owns a manual E39 530i like Matt’s, but in way better condition and in wagon form, so he’s one of us! He fits the type you’d expect from a government racing instructor – very serious, very clean-cut but with a hint of boyish excitement that his job is to play with cars all day.

The vehicle we used at the start of training was a Dodge Charger that had the ABS ripped out and rear seats lowered (to fit people with helmets). You start with light slalom drills, braking drills, and eventually work your way to a skid pad and then a wet braking zone.

All of this is to get your “eyes up” and look ahead, anticipating things just like us racecar drivers do. We are never looking at where the car is going; we are always looking at where we want the car to go. I found these drills easy-peasy… Well, except for the drifting, as you’ll see. I blamed the clunky boots I was wearing.

How To Hit Another Car Without Destroying Your Car

From there, we were able to get into ramming exercises, which means you learn how to hit other stationary cars doing the least amount of damage to your car. Up to this point, most of the training I went through is also given to diplomats as well (Matt will write more on this later). Not only do diplomats and their staff sometimes drive in places like Lebanon, Port-au-Prince, and Lagos, they also might find themselves in a situation where their protective detail has been disabled and they might have to suddenly take over the controls.

While it might be obvious to one of us that the lightest part of a car is its rear and the strongest part of your car is the frame rail, thus to hit another car you ideally want to ram the trunk of their car with the front left frame rail of your car, try telling that to an expert on grain subsidies that grew up in Brooklyn and didn’t get a license until they were 26. Thus, diplomats get to practice ramming through roadblocks as well.

Another instructor stands in front of the car you’re about to ram and signals you like a matador. Then you floor it, and he jumps out of the way just in time. How this is allowed is beyond me, but then again, this is training for something far more dangerous. This knowledge could be necessary as you’re trying to escape a crowded city street with cars in your way while being shot at.

This is something you will hear in the video and I want to make very clear, because I had a great time doing this but it’s deadly serious. With any security training, you need to remember to take everything you’re doing but then make it life or death. There are constant reminders of this from the instructors and when you’re near the coffee pot that features a lovely US government flier to the right of it explaining security measures for the building. Since 1943, more than 100 diplomatic security staff and four DSS agents have been killed in the line of duty.

Just last year, a convoy of DSS agents and other staff were attacked in Sudan.

A PIT Manuevuer Is Just About As Fun As You Think It Is

In between your eighth and ninth coffee next to the government flier, you will eventually be ready for the Pit-Maneuver, which means spinning another car out or being spun out. Thankfully, from NASCAR, I had a lot of experience with this. But the other instructor we were up against looked like a twin to Dennis Quaid, so much so that I looked up where Dennis Quaid was during our time there.

The joke became that Alec Baldwin and Dennis Quaid do this for fun and act for a “job.” Nonetheless, it added to my feeling that this was a surreal movie-like experience.

 

The Virginia State Police train at a facility nearby and one of the interesting differences between how a police officer trains for it and a DSS agent trains for it is that the DSS agents spend a lot of time learning how to counter-pit. Think about it this way. A convoy in Sierra Leone might be two vehicles and, if attacked, the bad guys might attempt to use a car to spit one of the security vehicles out of the way. As you’ll see in the video, the agent in the other car manages to get back going quickly after I pit him. Not shown is Matt flicking me off.

As we went around spinning out the car ahead of us and then being the car spun, I couldn’t help but get serious about how to try and do it better. Even when I’m trying to train for something different, there’s the competitive racecar driver in me. I was able to convince the crew to let me practice some J-turns (see the video) before it was time to take a break and get ready to combine all my training in an actual armored vehicle.

How To Protect Even The Most Annoying Diplomat

Typically, the training we were doing may take a couple of weeks, but we condensed it into one long day so I could attempt a real in-the-heart-of-a-foreign-city mission. This mission would be a simulated convoy scenario in a fully armored Suburban where I would be driving the car with the Ambassador of Estonia inside, who we dubbed “Big Bird,” also known as Autopian Publisher Matt Hardigree.

Why would someone want to attack Big Bird? Matt’s a chatty guy, so any secrets he has you can probably get out of him with a bottle of Saku and 30 minutes of silence.

We would be the lead car in the convoy, but when a car full of bad guys and guns pulls out and blocks the road, we must employ all of our many days (or, well, hours) of training. This starts with maximum braking while making sure the Suburban in the rear doesn’t ram into us. Then, assessing the situation, we have to get our car into reverse and change lanes to overtake the Suburban behind us, as they will then protect our car by becoming the “bullet sponge.”

Oh, and be full throttle in reverse. This means you’re doing about 30+ MPH in a suburban that weighs closer to an oil tanker than the one parked next to you at the grocery store. Once at full terminal velocity and far enough out of harm’s way, we do a quick synchronized turn-about and then drop into forward gear where we plant the throttle again to reassume the lead position of the convoy in the opposite direction.

It may seem pretty subdued, but there’s a lot of overcoming natural tendencies that makes it a bit awkward. The most challenging part is how damn heavy the thing is. First, it’s impressive how well it stops from doing 50 MPH for its weight, but when you start reversing and get to terminal velocity, the weight begins to act against you in a big way. Any movement of the wheel can set the beast into a swaying pendulum effect that quickly can spiral out of control.

In the video, you will see my instructor Mark Perkins put his hand on the wheel as he starts to feel this. I got better at it by the final attempt, but the early ones were quite concerning. I think if I were really trying to be a DSS agent, they would make me spend a few days driving tracks in reverse. Surprisingly, I should have been good at it with all my backward finishes last year.

I will admit that I was surprised by the amount of mental energy it took to drive the Suburban straight at full throttle in reverse. When we talked about this scenario from the outside it seemed so simple. It’s the little things that are less about performance driving and more about the procedure of keeping a human safe that start to weigh on you. This was a simulated drill in an armored vehicle with an exterior roll cage, and yet I could have easily rolled the vehicle and hurt the people inside.

I believe I passed because my protectee lived, but I clearly wasn’t ready for the real thing.

The Strangest Car Lot In America

One crazy thing for us car-mad people was the car lot, with over 700 cars ranging  from Dodge Chargers to endless suburbans from the last 30 years, armored and unarmored. Along with specials like manual Land Cruisers with armor that you could barely fit in them because the armor condensed the interior by many inches all around you. Right-hand driver manual Land Rovers and others were all there to represent the type of car a DSS agent may come across in the different parts of the world.

They don’t mess around; if it’s prevalent enough out there, they will have it at this facility for agents to train, spin, crash, and hot-wire. I asked about that last bit, and amazingly they told me that, yes, they do train agents in extreme emergency situations to “borrow” cars without keys, though somehow they did it in that government way of never actually saying yes.

When you hang around government people enough, you realize they all have this incredible ability to say a lot without ever saying anything – especially when it’s sensitive material. I think this was called an “improvised extraction technique.”

But they were kind enough to let us mess around with the Land Cruiser, the Land Rover, and this massive brand-new expected replacement for the Humvee that has been experiencing some technical issues.

It’s called the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle or JLTV for short. They love an acronym in the government. It’s incredibly high-tech, from the wild variance in its ride height to features like becoming a safety cell in the event of an attack. I got to sit in it, and we asked lots of questions of which I’m not sure how many were really answered. Maybe Matt remembers more, but the verdict was that it’s a cool vehicle but has left some room to be desired. It was said sometimes the mechanical simplicity, and less Silicon Valley tech of the Humvee was best.

I think we can all agree with that in many areas of our lives!

Would You Want A NASCAR Driver To Be On Your Protective Detail?

We only got to scratch the surface of this immense facility, and all the DSS does, but I did feel like I understood what to expect if we had the available time to be there for weeks. 

On the drive home that night after our training, very tired from what was an incredibly packed day, I did get a bit philosophical, as I couldn’t help but feel a sense of pride. 

Over the course of the day, I had met some incredibly dedicated, talented, and enjoyable people who were at the forefront of creating the best drivers outside of motorsports, all in the name of keeping our fellow citizens safe. As a guy who has made a living driving professionally in circles for people’s drunken entertainment, it was a beautiful site seeing professional driving being utilized for something far more important.

Was it fun? Definitely, at times when you let the seriousness of what they’re training for escape your mind. But most of all, I left with an even more profound respect for everyone who signs up to represent this country in a security capacity. They are all way cooler than I’ll ever be, so I’m glad that some of their training is fun, they deserve that.