Article by Steven Cole Smith
The maroon Ford Ranger that bobby Ore drives on two wheels is startlingly stock. He "locked" the rear end by welding the spider gears – an old racer’s trick to make sure both rear wheels are powered – and he inflates the tires to about 100 pounds of air pressure. That’s it. Everyone in our class at his Motion Picture Stunt driving School who wanted to take a ride got to. No one was disappointed by the experience.
Ore has been "skiing" cars and buses for 35 years, he says. He began learning to do this by driving up on a small ramp, coming closer and closer to getting the car up on two wheels. It took much practice. "I didn't’t have anyone to ask how it was done," he says. "I had to figure it out myself." Does he remember how it felt that first time it clicked? "Yeah. I had goose bumps. The car was leaning way over and I thought it was going to roll, and all of a sudden my hands did something right and the car went straight." Once he mastered going straight, he had to learn how to turn.
Ore, big for his age at 14, typically dirt stock car tracks, often talking his way into a racecar. "That was a good place to practice, during intermission. I’d always carry a chain in case I needed it to help turn the car back over." He seldom has. "The only time I've rolled was due to mechanical failure." One was a double decker bus he was attempting to ski in London, as part of a publicity event benefiting the late Princess Diana’s charities. The entire front-wheel assembly broke and came into the driver’s compartment. Eventually, he skied a beefed-up bus for 810 feet.
We go for a ride in the Ranger. Ore creeps up the ramp until he’s at the top; he wants his passenger to get a feel for what’s coming, because one passenger didn’t, and grabbed for the wheel, and almost turned the truck over. He backs up, makes a run for the ramp, and we’re up. The angle is amazing: the ranger is balanced on a knife-edge contact patch of thin sidewall rubber. The tires make agonized sandpapery sounds. (Ore gets roughly one mile per set of tires.) I’m hanging by the seatbelt, left hand pressed against the console. Ore steers with tiny precise inputs – left to go right and right to go left. He prefers to ski driver’s – side down, because the side that’s raised drops back down with a suspension-compressing thump, which can make for a sore back, Ore says, after repeated ski trips.
Ore’s car control is astounding. Earlier he had taken several of us on a relatively flat one mile oval track in his big Lincoln Mark VIII, which no one would suggest is a nimble car. At 50 mph, Ore does a seamless 180 – degree turn, flicks the transmission into reverse, travels backwards for 100 yards, then spins it forward again. The transition is so seamless you can’t even feel him shift the transmission – it’s like the lumbering Lincoln is riding on ball bearings. Ore plays it like a Stradivarius.
It is invigorating, but humbling. You think you’re a good driver? Yeah, so did I.
The fact that Bobby Ore drove a 13-ton double decker bus on two wheels for 810 feet-which not only made the 1989 edition of the Guinness book of Records, but also was featured on the cover- can be traced back to a very long dirt driveway at Ore's boyhood home in rural Oklahoma.
That is where, at 14, Ore began teaching himself to "ski"-drive a vehicle on two wheels, precariously balanced on the sidewalls of over-inflated tires. He was already on his way to learning precision driving, thus making possible another of his 13 world records: According to his biography, one was set when he "gave rides to 1003 people in a 10-hour period through a course featuring 13 turns with two inch clearance on either side of the car without hitting any cones."
Ore is now 49, and precision driving has been his life’s work-racing everything from sprint cars to dragsters; hiring out for films like Mimic, Spy Hard, Liar Liar and TV shows like Dark Skies and The Rockford Files; performing at state fairs and monster-truck shows; appearing in commercials; and making company presentations. He has spent years teaching people how to drive, mostly antiterrorism techniques for government agencies in the US and Europe. In 1996 he opened the motion Picture Stunt Driving School, teaching on weekends at a huge facility run by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s department in San Bernardino. Students range from actors to professional stuntmen and women to almost anyone who wants to learn what Ore teaches. More than 400 persons have found the Motion Picture Stunt Driving School, despite the fact that Ore doesn’t even bother to advertise. We, of course, were compelled to attend. Many of us at Car and Driver have been accused of being stunt drivers, but seldom in a complimentary context. Despite Ore’s best efforts, that is not likely to change.
Saturday begins early with classroom instruction. The student body is diverse Donald Petrie, for one, is an accomplished director (Grumpy Old Men, Mystic Pizza, Opportunity Knocks, this year’s My Favorite Martian). Gregory Crosby (grandson of Bing) is a screenwriter but his wife Spice, is a professional stuntwoman, so he came to get a taste of her career. Austin Peck is a tall, dark, and handsome heartthrob on NBC’s Days of Our Lives. Others in the class of a dozen or so are professional stunt people.
And there’s a ringer: Stuntman turned-director Hal Needham the most famous stuntman ever, is a close friend of Ore’s . Needham is here to brush up on his driving skills. It is like having Noah Webster sit in on your driving class.
Ore’s classroom instruction is wide-ranging. Use the available, mapped out space for a stunt, he says. A stunt successfully completed outside the camera’s range is not successful. You must be consistent. "If you can do something right one time out of five," Ore says, "nobody will be interested." Need to smoke the rear tires on an under powered junker? Crimp the rear brake lines, spray some WD-40 on the tires, stab the brake pedal, and floor it. In the movies, car conservation is a low priority compared to getting the proper image on film.
Preparation is critical. "The only thing that you can do that’s worse than blow the shot," Ore says "is to hurt yourself or somebody else. It could well be your last job in the business." Wiping out $45 000 worth of camera equipment will have a similarly effect on your stunt career. If you can’t do something, tell the coordinator-maybe something you can do will work If a stunt coordinator gives you a vehicle that simply can’t get the job done, don’t try it. A good stunt driver should be at least a mildly competent mechanic, as vehicles destined to be crashed or rolled are seldom showroom new.
Over and over, Ore hammers home the steering method he insists on: "shuffle steering," which places your hands at roughly 9 and 3 o’clock. Steer left, and your right hand drops to feed the steering wheel up, while your left hand pulls it down. Neither hand moves higher than 9 and 3 positions-no overhand steering. It’s a method that’s fairly common in Europe, but not in the US It takes the full weekend to get comfortable with it, works, "you never run out of steering" Ore says and there’s no way to cross up your arms."
Within two hours, we’re on the track. Ore’s fleet is made up of new or year old Fords of various models, most slightly flood damaged or former engineering vehicles. Ore and his students are tough on cars, but aside from the understandable need to frequently replace brakes and tires, he says the fleet is a dependable one. From there we practice the basics – over and over. There’s the "forward 180: The driver goes forward at about 30 mph and then gets off the accelerator, grabs the emergency brake, cranks the wheel as little as a quarter turn, eases off the brake, and you’re there. In theory. Anyone can do it, but to do an exact 180-degree every time requires practice.
Soon, Ore outlines a gate with orange pylons. Each pylon is an imaginary camera, or the star of the movie, whichever intimidates you the most. I smash many cameras, cripple many celebrities. Next, we modify the technique to so a "sliding 90", a 90 degree turn that places you in a three sided box, again outlined with cameras and celebrities. Needham and I as swapping driving duties in the same car. It takes him three tries to perfect the technique, which leaves the front, side and rear of the car no more than two feet from a pylon. It takes me eight times. Celebrities perish.
By Sunday morning, we’re perfecting the "reverse 180," which appears to be the opposite of the Forward 180 but requires a completely different technique, and no application of the emergency brake. Navigating a slalom course in reverse, using only the two outside mirrors, isn’t as difficult as it sounds once you master the rhythm. But by then, we are running low on unflattened pylon cameras and pylon celebrities.
Ringing our practice area is a mile long oval course. Ore puts us all on the track, two students to a car. The idea is to keep about a foot of distance between the cars beside, in front of, and behind you. (Driving in Detroit traffic is an instructive primer) side-to-side separation isn’t that hard, but coping with the chain reaction at 40 mph, when a car in front slows, is a challenge.
By Sunday afternoon, we’re putting it all together. Rather than stop after a Reverse 180, we learn to keep going. The informal final exam is a course that requires repeated forward and reverse 180s, a backward slalom, and a couple of 90 degree slides into a box. I do well enough to be satisfied, but not quite well enough to get a job offer from Needham or Petrie.
Everyone leaves happy and more than a little amazed at what he or she has accomplished. "If you had told me two days ago I’d be able to do what I can do now," says director Petrie, "I’d have said you were nuts." Ore is happy, too. "When you get a response like we did today – a smile, a sparkle in the eye – well, it’s clear they did pick up something that made them better drivers. It’s not about stunts – it’s about car control. And you can’t have too much of it."
If you want to give stunt driving a whirl, contact the Motion Picture Stunt Driving School at (818) 880-5678.
Contact Roslyn our office manager for more information and bookings at:
Bobby Ore Sports
10681 US HWY 98, Sebring, FL 33876
Tel: (863) 655 9292
FAX: (863) 655 6262
e-mail:oresmpsds@aol.com
URL: http://www.bobbyoresports.com