“It’s not going to be death by PowerPoint. It’s going to be fun,” Gregory Russell said Tuesday morning as his three driver education students settled into their chairs in a conference room at the Kodiak Comfort Inn.

“We are going to go through the presentation quickly and then we are going to go out and drive, and it is going to be fun,” Russell said.

Between the three students, Kodiak Police Department Staff Sgt. Kyle Valerio, KPD Lt. Ray Ellis and myself, there was at least 40 years worth of Alaska driving experience at the table. Still, Russell was promising to show us why cars go into uncontrolled slides, how a driver can regain control, and better, how not to lose control in the first place.

“Once that wheel is straight, then you can hammer down,” Russell said.

Much of this, we already know intuitively — at least I thought I knew — but Rusell’s tips on “chasing the grip,” would be useful once the students were behind the wheel of the spacious 1998 Ford Crown Victoria that Russell uses as a trainer.

But we wouldn’t be on a racetrack. Russell, a 20-year police work veteran, former police chief in Kotzebue and FBI Academy graduate, eschews track training as unrealistic.

Instead, the Crown Vic is equipped with computer-controlled outriggers that have small aircraft-type tires on them. The extra wheels are on swivel casters so they roll wherever the vehicle’s momentum takes them. They are also on hydraulic-controlled lifts, so the instructor can take weight off the Ford’s wheels causing it to lose traction.

When a car is lifted on the outriggers, it makes driving on dry pavement feel like driving on ice.

“It’s like a low-rider,” Russell said after we piled into the car. Then he demonstrated how he could lift the car by pushing buttons on a handheld controlled named “Hal.” His students wisecracked about thumping hip-hop music and cruising.

Once we were driving, the wisecracking was limited to the backseat. The truly remarkable thing about the training rig — marketed nationally under the name Skidcar and provided to KPD by the Alaska Police Standards Council — is how realistic it felt.

“People think that I am making the car go out of control, but I’m not,” Russell said. “I am not going to cause you to lose control, I am just going to create a high-stress environment for you to drive in.”

When Russell took weight from all four of the Crown Vic’s wheels and coached me through a makeshift course on the tarmac at the Kodiak Airport. It felt almost exactly like driving on a frozen lake.

“Unwind it, unwind it, unwind it. Turn it back a little bit,” he said calmly as I tried to pull the Crown Vic out of slide. “Your next turn is over there. Look there. You’re going that way.”

Even at slow speeds, driving without traction can be stressful. Russell’s coaching voice is expertly calm. His lecture about how humans react during stressful situations came back to me as I attempted to pilot the sliding car.

Just as Russell predicted, I had tunnel vision. I could only see the line directly over the hood of the car, as if braced for a collision.

Without consciously lifting my eyes, I would not have been able to keep the car between the bright orange and tire-tread scuffed cones.

The loss of peripheral vision is something police officers know about from their training.

It can affect their performance with firearms. It can affect performance while searching a building or while making an arrest that requires a combination of hand-to-hand combat and negotiation.

“It is a natural effect of the way that your body reacts to stress,” Russell said. “Your body begins to exclude things that it doesn’t perceive to be important to survival.”

When boxers are fighting, they only see the opponent, not the crowd or the ambience of the arena, Russell said.

“That can work against you in a crisis situation, so we have the student experience it and talk them through it.”

What happens to drivers is they don’t see through the turn. They aren’t conscious of how to “chase the grip” by aligning the front-tire tread to the direction of travel. And without traction, they are likely to drive straight into the ditch, light pole, or oncoming car their tunnel vision has focused on.

“You want the mind to be engaged,” Russell said. “As you are straightening out the tire, you are increasing the tire’s ability to give you grip. And it is all about grip.”

In police work, and in any high speed or traffic-heavy driving, losing the grip can be fatal.

Russell brought that point home during his classroom presentation using statistics and headlines.

Motor vehicle accidents are the leading cause of death in the United States among people between the ages of 3 and 33. Accidents are the leading cause of on-the-job death for police officers, too.

In 2005, 155 officers nationwide were killed in the line of duty in vehicle accidents.

Russell said slow-speed training on a simulated slick street helps officers train for hazards they may encounter in real life, most of which do not involved racetrack speeds.

“One of the old-school ways was to train on a straight-a-way or a race track, but police officers don’t drive on race tracks. They drive on streets and in alleys. They don’t drive on banked corners or in high-performance cars that have supercharged engines,” Russell said.

In recent years, police departments, fire departments and ambulance services have been working to provide more real-life training.

“They train at night. They train in rain and in snow, and in the gear that they would be wearing,” he said.

After Tuesday’s driving lesson, Ellis and Valerio riffed excitedly about how realistic the Skidcar felt, and how they wished every school kid would get driver training, especially for slick roads.

“It gives the same sensation of sliding and losing control, and regaining control. But you don’t have to get up to those speeds where you would put yourself at risk and put everybody else at risk,” Valerio said.

For an officer on the way to an emergency, arriving at the scene is a necessity, Ellis said, but arriving 10 seconds earlier isn’t worth the risk.

“If I am heading to try and help him,” Ellis said, nodding toward Valerio, “and if I try to save 10 seconds, but I don’t ever get there, I can’t help him.”

Mirror writer Scott Christiansen can be reached via e-mail at schristiansen@kodiakdailymirror.com.