The slalom course, a road hosed down and lined with cones, was bonspiel worthy.
My black-ice driving strategy is loosely based on my Great White Shark swimming strategy - in other words, I leave it in the hands of the gods. And I don't think I'm alone.
Winter driving taps into a deep wellspring of Canadian fatalism; like being selected as dinner by a giant pelagic fish, hitting glare ice without warning places you at the mercy of forces greater than yourself.
Or so I thought. Now I was headed to Minden, Ont., for a lesson with Ian Law, a racer and driving instructor who specializes in the art of driving fast on ice. He was quick to shatter some misconceptions.
For starters: Ice isn't that slippery. For a skilled driver with the right tires, ice can offer surprising amounts of traction. You just have to know how to use it.
"I've never seen ice crash a vehicle," Law proclaimed. "What I see is drivers crashing because of their reaction on ice."
In his view, almost every ice-related car crash can be chalked up to poor technique. As a racer, commuter and driving school owner (ILR Car Control), Law sees a lot of drivers, and he has a pretty dismal opinion of most people's skills, even on dry pavement: "People learn just enough to pass the driver's test," he said. "That's not good enough."
Law takes a two-pronged approach to winter-driving skills. First comes theoretical knowledge. We spent several hours learning about the physics of driving, and how to spot trouble ahead. Law looks for subtle cues that many drivers are oblivious to. A thaw followed by a temperature drop, for example, puts him on high alert. So does a gap in a line of trees, which can alter wind patterns and refrigerate a section of road.
These were just two in an amazingly long list of warning signs. I would never look at a winter road the same way again. "You've got to be watching and thinking," Law said. "That's what will keep you alive."
Now it was time to find out whether I had what it took to drive on ice like the pros. Law's crew had turned a nearby fairground into a frozen skid-pad that they christened The Circle of Death. "You'll learn how to stick," Law said. "There's more grip than you think." As he spoke, snowmobiles whizzed past just a few metres away.
First up was a slalom course - a local road had been hosed down and lined with orange cones. Now the surface was bonspiel-worthy, so slick that I could barely walk on it. Law assured me that I could navigate the course without a problem as long as I stuck to the fundamentals: be smooth, don't panic, and look where you want to go.
This is one of the universal rules of great driving, whether you're on ice or a dry road. Staring at an obstacle leads to a phenomenon known as target fixation. Looking at something makes you go toward it, whether you want to or not. But almost every driver does this anyway, like moths drawn to a flame. This was one of several bad habits that Law would beat out of me.
"It's easier to teach a 16-year-old," he told me. "They aren't used to doing things wrong yet."
Now I was in the car with Doug, one of Law's instructors. I was told to drive straight at a set of cones, brake at the last second, then swerve around them by releasing the brakes and cutting the wheel. And of course I had to look at the empty spot where I wanted to go, not the cones I was trying to avoid.
Doug told me to go faster. It felt a little out of control, but Doug was the boss. As the cones loomed, I resigned myself to hitting them. "Brakes off!" Doug ordered. "Turn!"
It worked. By releasing the brakes, I had freed up traction that was now available for turning. As Law had explained, a car is stuck to the road by four patches of rubber the size of a human palm. You can only apply so much force before they break loose.
Now it was time for an experiment that would replicate what happens when a panicking driver tries to avoid an obstacle - I headed straight for a snow bank, slammed on the brakes and tried to turn. But the car kept sliding straight ahead. When I released the brakes, my steering returned. Saved.
I had now seen, first-hand, the precise circumstances of countless winter-driving accidents.
"Most drivers aren't capable of braking and steering around an obstacle," Laws said. "What they're good at is braking and running into things."
Now it was time for some panic stopping. The correct technique depends on your car. In a car with ABS, like mine, it was simple - keep the car straight with light steering inputs, hit the brakes as hard as you can and let the car's electronics take care of the details. In a non-ABS car, a driver has to carefully modulate the pressure on the brakes, pushing as hard as possible without locking up the wheels.
In theory, ABS is superior to even the best drivers, because it can modulate each wheel individually -something no human can do. But as I quickly learned, there's a vast difference between ABS systems. From city-traffic speeds, my eight-year-old Honda took about eight car lengths to stop. Then I watched a late-model Audi do it in half the distance.
So would I be better off without ABS? Maybe. One of my classmates, a retired auto mechanic with a rusty Dodge that had standard brakes, stopped shorter than I did. So much for digital wizardry. Unless you can afford the newest technology, an educated foot and mental discipline seemed to be a better bet.
Law revealed another great myth - all-wheel-drive doesn't help you stop or go around corners any better. "All-wheel-drive is not a safety feature," he said. "It's a performance feature. It lets you go into the ditch at higher speed."
He pointed out the ineluctable physics of winter driving: Whether you're trying to accelerate, corner or stop, a vehicle obeys the law of momentum. The only force opposing this is traction.
When you're accelerating, all-wheel-drive gives you an advantage. But it doesn't help you turn or brake - and thanks to all-wheel-drive's superior acceleration, you may be going faster than you should.
"All-wheel-drive is one of the biggest myths in the car industry," Law said. "It makes people feel invulnerable. They find out the hard way that an all-wheel-drive car doesn't stop any better than a regular one."
Now the day was over. I had learned how to stick better, and I had discovered that my ABS system was from the automotive stone age. Law offered a final bit of wisdom.
"The driver is the ultimate safety feature," he said. "A good driver in the worst car is safer than a bad driver in the best car. That's what people don't realize."
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