At any given moment in any given city there is a Most Dangerous Driver title holder somewhere on the road. The competition never stops. Sometimes it is intense, sometimes slow. But competition there is and it is never called off – not on account of rain, nightfall or holidays. It doesn’t matter that there isn’t an official award ceremony. It doesn’t matter that there’s no cup, no trophy, not even a t-shirt for entering. It doesn’t matter that the title is short-lived and changes hands again and again throughout the day. It doesn’t matter that many title holders retire from their fifteen minutes of menace completely unaware of their achievement. It doesn’t even matter that if the competition were properly judged there would be some very close scores and possibly some disputed outcomes. What matters is that there are always contestants behind the wheel.

The competition is not some kind of general Bad Driver contest. Even if there were such a thing it would be boring and anyway would always result in a massive tie for first place during each commute hour.

And it isn’t a “Boy howdy, you should get a load of my nephew behind the wheel” kind of contest. That would be like nominating someone for this year’s Academy Award based on last year’s performance. To win the Most Dangerous Driver title, past performance means nothing. The competition takes place this very minute, out on the public pavement, guiding heavy machinery and successfully endangering the lives of others.

Doing something like that well sounds easy, but it is not. Competing seriously requires a level of commitment, persistence and even training that very few among the general population of merely bad drivers can ever hope to reach. There are two scoring categories. Both are challenging and in order to claim the title it is necessary to score well in each one.

The first scoring category is psychomotor impairment. Blood doping is allowed. Ethyl alcohol is the performance enhancer of choice for almost all contenders, but other substances may also be employed. Naturally anyone, even untrained beginners, can use blood doping and of course they compete at a disadvantage if they don’t. But what experienced competitors understand is that while blood doping is a powerful tool it is nonetheless still a tool and, like all tools, must be used properly. It isn’t as simple as, say, going to a party, drinking all night and then driving home. Too many inexperienced competitors, having used this method to reach a qualifying level of psychomotor impairment, then find themselves unable to drive at all, or to drive only as far as the nearest ditch or tree, at which point they stop driving and are disqualified. The challenge for serious competitors is to reach a qualifying level of psychomotor impairment while still remaining functional enough to drive very badly.

Scoring in the second category is subjective, but does count for half the total. Competitors are expected to display an exceptionally high degree of abstraction from present circumstances. Evidence that a competitor has maintained contact with the real world may lead to disqualification. High marks require a certain extra something beyond mere denial or flakiness. It is impossible to describe, but blood doping alone cannot provide it and top competitors all have it. As with psychomotor impairment, a difficult balance is key to a high score. A top competitor will be able to point to a mass of smoldering metal that moments ago was an automobile, say something to the attending police officer along the lines of “I just want to drive home” and actually, genuinely believe that doing so is an option. The inexperienced contestant, on the other hand, will just stare blankly at the officer and not have the slightest idea of what is not happening. There are many examples that illustrate these points.

Finalist Number Two first came to the attention of the authorities as she drove north along the Willamette River on Interstate 405 on a bare front right tire rim, showering sparks everywhere and terrifying shore birds into flight with the scream of metal against pavement. A state cop was parked along the shoulder, issuing his first ticket of the day when he heard the noise. Probably, he thought, it was an 18-wheeler with a heavy load coming loose and about to spill – very dangerous. He looked up just in time to see a white Thunderbird sail by. His very first thought was that Ford had once again screwed the design pooch on the ‘76 Thunderbird, just like they had the year before. A fraction of a second later he registered the bare rim, the gigantic fountain of sparks, and the length of tire rubber that was caught up in the wheel well and was battering the car’s fender to a metallic pulp.

Finalist Number Two glanced down at the speedometer and smiled when she saw the needle right up against 85 mph. At this hour on a Saturday morning there wasn’t much traffic, so she went ahead and goosed the accelerator. This caused the noise she’d been ignoring for the past few miles to get even louder, so she turned up the volume on the radio as far as it would go and resumed singing along with “Dancing Queen” at the top of her lungs.

It may surprise the reader to learn that while most serious traffic accidents involve the current title holder, most current title holders do not end up in accidents. To understand this, consider what might happen if you took a number 7 iron and a bucket of golf balls and stood in the middle of the intersection of 6th and Burnside in downtown Portland, chipping shots at the windows of the US Bank building. If you were very lucky, perhaps one in a dozen balls would actually go through a window. It’s that way with most title holders most of the time.

But at this particular moment on this particular Saturday morning, as the sun was just clearing the top of Mt. Hood, the competition had narrowed down to two finalists, and both were former title holders. It is to be expected that finalists will tend to be former title holders. But for two of them to wind up in the same place at the same time is very rare.

Both finalists had been drinking most of the night. This much goes almost without saying. What lifted them above the level of the many other contestants on the road at the same time was that they had both engaged in an effective but extremely difficult technique aimed at improving their score in both the essential categories at once – psychomotor impairment and abstraction from reality. It is a technique that carries a nearly 100% failure rate for run-of-the-mill contestants. But while luck does have a role to play, this is essentially a contest of skill, so experience counts. Both finalists were very experienced and had employed the technique flawlessly that night.

The technique is to sleep. Done correctly, the contestant is able to pass out just long enough to allow the alcohol contained in the last set of drinks to enter the blood stream, before turning the key in the ignition and going for the title. Sleep too short a time and contestants risk getting behind the wheel with wasted intoxicants lying uselessly in the stomach. Sleep too long and normal metabolism begins reducing the intoxicant level – not below qualifying levels but certainly below championship ones.

The interested reader may well ask why simply carrying a supply of intoxicants while driving wouldn’t serve the same purpose. That is a solid technique and popular among journeymen contestants. But sleep, when accomplished by a trained competitor, provides something that an open beer can can’t, and that is the window of opportunity afforded by waking up. Anyone can drink. Anyone can pass out. Anyone can wake up afterwards. It is the skillful combination of the three that marks the champion. Waking up creates the window. It is during this short time that the contestant is, at the very point of taking a run at the title, able to take advantage of the extra confusion, disorientation, and collapse of motor skills that are the consequence of suddenly coming out of an intoxicant-induced stupor and trying to find the way home. It takes a championship temperament to drink all night, pass out, wake up again and still be able to manufacture the thought of driving home much less to be able to put the key in the ignition.

Finalist Number One had been awake for less than 10 minutes, had breath that was probably flammable and was driving west on Highway 26, up the steep incline, headed toward Beaverton. In a few moments it would no longer matter that he actually lived to the east in Gresham, 20 miles down the same highway, just in the opposite direction. He was not weaving, he was not taking swipes at the center guard rail, he wasn’t wandering into the next lane. He was intently focused. His eyes were locked on the road ahead. He was pinned to the fast lane as if he were driving a slot car. He was traveling at 12 miles per hour.

Finalist Number Two was competing at a slight disadvantage. Although her blood alcohol level was comparable to that of Finalist Number One, she had been awake for almost 30 minutes, substantially mitigating the advantages of interrupted REM sleep. But experienced competitors are nothing if not innovative. She compensated for her comparatively low levels of sleep toxins by scoring huge bonus points in Category Two by means of high speed and bare rim. Finalist Number Two took the connector ramp to westbound Highway 26 and floored the accelerator as the struggling Thunderbird briefly slowed to 75 mph as it started up the incline, less than a mile behind Finalist Number One.