We Studied Distracted Driving…By Spraying Each Other in the Face With Cologne
We hope you take pleasure in our pain.
It seemed like a good idea at the time.
We—by which I mean almost the entire staff of The Drive—had all road tripped up to Lime Rock Park for a day of testing out the best new cars we'd been able to wrangle. The ever-industrious video team had scratched off nearly every item on the day's itinerary: Challenger Hellcat wide body shoot, check; Civic Type R shoot, check; having Erica Lourd build a sandwich in a moving Subaru, check. There was just one item left: Distracted driving autocross.
Deputy editor Josh Condon and I had...well, we didn't quite get shanghaied into it, but we didn't quite volunteer for it, either. Much of our reticence came from the fact that we'd never formally pinned down what the specifics of the "distracted driving autocross" would be. Would we try to post to Instagram while lapping Lime Rock's winding, hilly short course? Try and interrogate each other while in motion? Or would we wind up going with the video team's early suggestion, which sounded more less like a distraction and more like the sort of thing that might violate the Geneva Conventions*, either under grounds of "torture" or "chemical weapons use"—blasting us in the face with horrible cologne as we drive.
Well, lucky for Josh and me, we wound up having to deal with two of those bad options simultaneously. The final ruling: Each of us would do two laps of the Lime Rock autocross behind the wheel of the Lexus LC500 with supervising producer Cait Knoll sitting shotgun, figuratively spraying us with questions—and literally spraying us with a cut-rate knockoff of an Abercrombie & Fitch scent she'd had since high school that smelled like Limp Bizkit sounds.
It sucked. But our pain is your pleasure, so enjoy the video.
*Yes, I'm well aware of the fact that the international treaty banning the use of chemical weapons is called the "Geneva Protocol," and is not part of the Geneva Conventions. Deal with it.
**Also, as the one who wound up writing this post, I take this opportunity to point out that Josh had already driven the Lexus on the Lime Rock autocross course prior to the test, whereas I was going in cold. I firmly state that I could have won if I'd had equal time to practice.
