John Fraser and his merry crew spend all week, heads down, bums up, turning wayward coppers and interstate jockeys into mild mannered professionals who are ready to gently cruise the highways. They do this by drawing pictures on blackboards, then driving a B-Double sideways down the back carpark!

For kicks, on weekends they invite lunatics, larrikins and enthusiasts to bring anything from Ford to Ferrari or Pulsar to Porsche and to have a ball doing handbrakies and skittling witches’ hats, while throwing in some theory and a pretty reasonable lunch.

On the day, there were 4 groups if you like –

• Proper 4WDs – Phil Woods in the Forester and Mark Ottway in the RX Turbo;

• 3 WRXs, a Honda and a BMW, representing the hoons;

• Rick Dean (Patrol) and Ben and Donna Longland in their Prado, to show us how slow and cumbersome the big 4WDs are; and

• Sharon Kelly (Falcon), Casey Green (Corolla), Caitlyn Smart (Camira) and Peter Brown (Falcon), who were there for all the right reasons.

I must congratulate Peter Green for taking a rain check and watching daughter Casey from the sidelines. Good idea Maryke! Casey’s lines through the corners and careful use of the throttle showed that she had learned nothing from her father.

We were allowed to do circuits of the Centre’s road track – interesting off camber corners, uneven radius bends and other interesting bits. Our instructor, Greg Carr, moved from car to car offering tips and compliments (too fast – get over to the left – move your seat forward – wrong grip of the wheel – too slow – stop smiling – etc).

Then the fun bit – the pear shaped circuit with added water – yep – the skidpan. 3 laps, fast as you like, watch out for the light tower (better still, don’t watch out for the light tower or you might hit it!). Try a bit of boost on the corners – oops, it understeers, but the ABS works. Next lap, full boost, bit of handbrake – oops, check mirror to see where I’m going. Last lap, sideways – now we’re cooking!

Craig in the white REX shows us how it’s done (don’t mind the racing tyres, but I’m buggered if I’m going driving wearing ballet shoes), while Casey astounds us all with a 1 minute 10 second lap in perfect control in the Corolla. Her time was only six seconds slower than my mad hatch and two seconds faster than the BMW with its traction control and ABS.

After lunch, we joined the other group down the back paddock doing the witches’ hat waltz. I’m not sure what the Patrol got up to, but at one stage Rick’s face was a funny grey colour and he was heard to mutter, “braked – sideways – ditch”.

Lastly, our instructors got us to drive round three witches hats against the clock. Only catch was that we had to do a 360⁰ of all the hats.

Half an hour and fourteen sets of second hand tyres later we discovered that:

1. Falcons lean a lot and don’t go round in circles

2. Patrols don’t go round in circles (unless they are trying to go straight ahead)

3. REXs go real well if you wear ballet shoes and practice Scandinavian flicks

4. RX Turbos can do circles on full boost without falling over (just)

5. Teenagers in low powered 2WDs can do it all, five seconds slower than any of the above.