How To Drive: The perfect B-road

You don’t need to enter a zen-like trance here but you do want your head clear and focused, and sounds play a big role in that. So listen to your car instead, whatever it may be. Even an EV will tell you things from the noises it makes as it meanders across the landscape, while a more tuneful ICE car will always produce its best sounds on a quiet B-road.

If you have a decent satnav it’s also well worth zooming in to a 250-500m live view. Why? Although I’m not suggesting you use the screen as pace notes, you can still get a good idea of what’s coming up by taking brief glimpses – specifically the pattern of the road that lies ahead. It’s a genuinely useful way of spotting a naughty hairpin on a road you may not know, and it works particularly well at night.

But the best tools when driving across a great but perhaps unknown road are your own eyes, ears, brain and backside. Some have better balance and more spatial awareness than others and these things tend to be what makes them great drivers, rather than keen ones; there’s a difference. But no matter how naturally gifted or otherwise you might be, reading roads and looking as far down them as you can are learnable techniques anyone can use, and you’d be amazed how well they work once you’ve learned them. Also how much safer you’ll be.

How so? Because if you look to absorb what’s coming towards you between the far horizon and whatever is 400 metres away, the stuff that appears right in front of you will always present you with fewer surprises – and surprises are what you want to remove most when driving across your favourite B-road.

Try to process all the information available to you – from the telegraph poles that line the road in the distance to the road signs in front of your nose. Look at the road’s surface to gauge if it looks greasy or damp, and if it’s seriously cold then keep half an eye on the temperature gauge to see if it’s dropping: if it is it could already be icy where you are, rather than where you’ve just come from.

All this may seem obvious, but in the heat of the moment, when that classic B-road appears in the windscreen and your pulse quickens, it’s amazing how easy it is to forget. But if you already know roughly what’s coming three-quarters of a mile away, your eyes having clocked the farmhouse in the distance, up on the hill on the right – which probably has a driveway that will meet your road somewhere up ahead, also on the right – you’ll naturally slow and be on high alert for a tractor or something similar ahead. Your mind will be pre-programmed to encounter and react to a hazard if one materialises – and this is the exact state in which you should be at all times when driving across a good road: calm but supremely focused on what’s around you, mind primed to react – like a pick-pocket constantly on the verge of being rumbled.

You can also learn to position your car correctly to enable you to read roads and corners more easily. Look at the pictures and captions at the end of this story to see why this matters so much. Don’t be afraid to use all the road if you have a clear line of sight into a corner, nobody’s trying to pass you from behind, and the white lines leading towards it are broken. You might think some road markings are there specifically to thwart your fun, but mostly they’re not. They are there for a reason.

As such, never cross a solid white line so you can see better into a corner; there will likely be a side turning or a dip, or something you haven’t spotted that defines why the white line is solid. But if the line is broken there’s no reason why you shouldn’t use more of the road to get a better view along a road, well before corners, so long as you get back in your lane before the apexes of those corners arrive.

On quiet, open roads with broken white lines you can virtually ignore those white lines so long as you have good, clear vision of what lies ahead. Don’t be afraid to use most of the road’s width to generate more vision along a road. In many ways it’s safer to use more of the road than that defined by broken white lines because anything that improves your overall vision of what lies ahead is safer. If it gives you more knowledge of what’s coming, you’re less likely to encounter an unseen hazard. And good vision is the holy grail.

In the days before daytime running lights, I’d have always said put your sidelights on, too, even in broad daylight. Not so you can see any better but so that others can see you. I’m not saying you should scream down the road, lights ablaze, flashing at any other car you encounter that happens to be going more slowly than you. But being noticed is a good thing – on any road but especially on a quiet B-road. And if you do overtake someone, give them a nice wide berth from behind. Don’t scream up behind them, downshift noisily then howl past at 7000rpm in second gear. Breeze by smoothly in third or fourth instead. A quiet wave of thanks rarely goes unappreciated either.

The rest is mostly common sense – and sometimes just plain good manners – but once you’ve got your mind in the right place and have realised that what happens at the end of your bonnet is not what matters most, driving well across a B-road can be one of life’s great pleasures. And speed is not an essential ingredient. But to give you a better idea of what to look for and basically how to drive better along your favourite B-road, here are some pictures with captions that might also be useful…

Finally, you should try to remember to relax before setting off across your favourite road. An over-excited mind will try too hard, drive too fast, fail to spot the stuff that matters most and probably won’t enjoy – or remember – the experience in the way it could, and would, were it in a calmer state. I’m not saying you need to become the Dalai Lama when driving across your favourite B-road, but stay calm and drink it all in quietly and you’ll enjoy it more and be less of a hazard in the process. Now go, have some fun, be safe. And behave.

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