The fickle finger of fate deals a blow to the myth of invincibility

Try as you might, you just can't hold back all the awful out there waiting to knock you down and stomp you flat.

You can fool yourself. You can believe that you are actually in charge of your destiny, that if you do things just so, that if you train and plan and prepare diligently for a certain outcome, that outcome is ensured. You can believe, for instance, that if you're a very good driver, you'll be able to drive your way out of trouble.

As stupid as it sounds, I secretly believed that very thing. And then last week happened.

The centerpiece of the week was our annual driving school. Every year, Automobile Magazine rents a track and hires professional high-performance driving instructors so the entire staff can spend a good chunk of time in a safe environment, fine-tuning and building driving skills. The art department, the production team, our receptionist and office manager, the motor gophers, and even our publisher spend the day getting the sort of driver's ed you wish every kid in America could get before being handed the keys to the highway.

The idea of Track Day began several years ago, when we realized that the performance level of the average new car had outstripped the driving ability of the average automotive journalist. We were not racing the way we used to, not spending as much quality time on closed circuits, while the number of high-performance cars had dramatically increased. In addition, we needed our entire staff, not just the editors, to roll the odometers on our Four Seasons test cars high enough to be able to make solid judgments about their reliability and operating costs. Ten or twelve Four Seasons cars a year times 30,000 miles each equals the need for all hands on deck. And all those hands need to know what they're doing. Hence Track Day.

Our instructors this year were Rick Bye and David Empringham, both racing drivers from Toronto who are also wonderfully capable teachers. They began the day taking our least experienced drivers around the track in sedans, explaining the basic physics of the course and of the cars. The rest of the time was devoted to individual instruction, car by car, driver by driver, from motor gopher to editor-in-chief.

We resisted the urge to bring every hot car we can think of, but we salted the mix of more sedate training wheels (Saturn Ion Red Line, Dodge SRT-4, Mini Cooper S, Chrysler 300C) with a Mazda RX-8, a Honda S2000, a Mitsubishi Evo RS, a Porsche Boxster S, and the runaway hit of the day, a Viper-engined Dodge Ram SRT-10 pickup that executive editor Mark Gillies had sideways for most of the course.

Every one of us gets something from Track Day. Gillies, our most experienced racing driver, was looking for an extra edge for the coming season's vintage racing. Two members of our group had never driven fast on a closed course and learned for the first time how to heel-and-toe downshift. Our new production manager learned in a snap how to operate a manual transmission. Several crucial behind-the-scenes production and art people showed an amazing level of car control at speed.

We're not preparing our staff to be little Fangios. We're helping our writers achieve a level of skill that will make their evaluations unquestionably accurate. We're preparing all of our staff to be able to control a car in extreme situations, to be better able to avoid the circumstances that conspire to get them into trouble on the road.

Track Day used to make me feel better about our invincibility on the road. That would, of course, be stupid. You can be the best driver in the world and find yourself a witless tool of fate.