Learn to Drive Like Jason Bourne

The Racing School has launched two fun new courses which teach you how to drive like a Hollywood stunt driver.

In the ‘Drifting’ and ‘Stunt Driving’ experiences you learn how to pull-off perfect power slides, do J-Turns and parallel park using your handbrake, using specialist techniques developed for the film industry.

The courses are available at Rockingham Motor Speedway Northants, through The Racing School, and cost £105 each for 75 minutes of tuition with 25 minutes of this in-car. We went along to try them out. And while it is unlikely we’ll land a job as Matt Damon’s double, we did have a lot of fun.

It doesn’t mater that the cars we used were more East Enders than End of Days - a Mazda MX-5 is fine for learning how to drift and a Nissan Micra is ideal for all the other stunts. And because the cars are cheap to run, it means you get far more time behind the wheel than you do on some supercar experience.

On the drift course you start off doing simple doughnuts moving on to wide circles then figure of eights, learning how to balance the car in a slide using delicate steering and throttle inputs. What’s different to other drift courses is that you also learn how to drift the car as if it was being filmed in a chase sequence which means finishing off the stunt with a comntrolled spin right in front of a camera.

As we found out this is very hard. Once you know the various techniques for getting the car sliding and spinning, pulling off the manoeuvres properly is a matter of practice. Lots of it. In fact the course is too short for most newbies to really get to grips with the control required to pull off seamless drifts.

That’s why the stunt course, which you do in an even less glamorous Nissan Micra, is actually the more rewarding, for a one-off experience at least. That’s because the moves are more about knowing the special techniques and don't actually require hours of practice. And once you are shown what to do, you'll be amazed just how easy it is to pull-off a perfect J-turn or to hand-brake parallel park. After just a couple of goes you will be looking like a pro.

We have tried lots of driving experiences here at iMOTOR, and, for the money, the Stunt Driving experience is probably one of the most rewarding. And the best bit is that when you get home you can practice your new skills with your entry-level Vauxhall Corsa in your local car park. We didn't tell you to do that by the way.