Special licence for sports car drivers?

By Eugene Wee

I ONCE lost control of a BMW sports car, skidding and sending its rear end in a wide arc and almost hitting another car.

Here's the funny part - I was going at only 15kmh.

It's funny only because no one got hurt when I skidded (I was driving in snow at the time in the US).

Just like it was funny when some of my friends saw pictures of how a 36-year-old man ran his Ferrari sports car into a railing here last weekend, smashing it perhaps beyond repair.

"Don't know how to drive, don't drive sports car," was the wisecrack of the moment from Toyota and Nissan drivers across the island.

But here's the thing - they have a point.

At the moment, you don't need any special training to be allowed to get behind the wheel of sports car that is powerful enough to rocket you from 0-100kmh faster than it takes you to read this sentence.

Maybe it's time that changed.

These days, you don't need a Ferrari or a Porsche to be a speed demon.

Ah Beng racers are already doing it in Japanese machines, which are equally, if not more, powerful, and cost a fraction of the luxury marques.

And with more such powerful sports cars now within the reach of younger, less experienced drivers who learned to drive in a 1.5L family sedan, the risk of more such accidents happening is higher.

There is already a precedence for this here. Just look at how motorcycle riders' licences are structured.

Beginners start with a Class 2B licence, which allows them to operate motorcycles under 200cc. If you want to ride bigger and faster bikes, you'll need to get a Class 2A licence (201-400cc), which you can get only after a year of having a Class 2B one.

And if you fancy yourself on a Harley, then you'll need a Class 2 licence for bikes over 400c, which you can only get after a year of having a Class 2A.

More experience needed

The rationale is simple - the more powerful the machine, the more experience and training you'll need to handle it properly.

But there may be challenges in applying this same rationale to powerful sports cars.

How do we judge what qualifies as "powerful"? We can't go by engine capacity (the 1.3L Mazda RX8 is 20 per cent more powerful than a 2.4L Honda Accord). Measurement by horsepower is meaningless as it's akin to judging how fast a man can run based only on his weight.

One possibility could be to rate cars by how quickly it can go from 1-100kmh. The faster your car can get to 100kmh, the more powerful it must be, and thus, the more skill you need to handle it.

The only problem is that this information isn't collected by the authorities as part of vehicle registration details. Perhaps they should, and start getting around to implement for drivers what they've been doing with motorcyclists.

Because if a wet-behind-the-ears speed demon were to lose control as he was overtaking me in sunny Singapore, he sure isn't going to be doing it at 15kmh.

This article was first published in The New Paper.