LET’S TALK ABOUT SPEED. SPEED that thrills, not kills. Your ability to make speed behind the wheel with consummate skill. Mastery of the driving craft. An understanding of the physics and a feel for the machinery. You have it. Sure you do.

As you thread deftly through traffic, secure in the knowledge that, as a driver, you have it, baby—and the common folk don’t—consider this: Piloting a car is different from any other skill. Push yourself to your limit in a round of golf and you might hit one farther than ever before or doink it into the trees. Personal best or your worst hack, either way it’s okay.

But try expanding your abilities behind the wheel on a public road and, well, let’s not go there. Like former Indy car great Danny Sullivan once said, “In racing, there are no five-yard penalties for mistakes.” It’s the same on the street. If you want to hone your skills, get thee to a high-performance driving school.

The use-it-or-lose-it rule couldn’t be more appropriate when applied to high- performance driving. That’s because pushing a car anywhere near its limits is a delicate dance between traction, vehicle and driver, in a range where we don’t normally operate. You could drive 100,000 miles a year on the road and it wouldn’t make a difference. Unless you are an active race driver sliding cars around corners on a weekly basis, you are not in the practice of feeling and reacting to a car at its limits.

And knowing where those limits are in a visceral way is the key to mastering and enjoying the craft of driving. You must drive in the zone, not thinking, just acting. Very Zen. Very true. Most important, if you’re not constantly using those skills, you’re losing them. Because there’s no way to practice safely what are essentially racing-type techniques unless you are on a track.

I experienced this phenomenon recently when I attended an intensive two-day advanced racing course put on by the Panoz Racing School at its mondo Road Atlanta complex. I’m one of those nut cases with many thousands of racing miles in his background, but the key here is past tense. I haven’t competed in a serious car race in years.

Despite periodic personal tuneups with karting events and maximum-g blasts around my favorite on-ramps, I was astounded by how much skill I had lost. It took two sweat-soaked days of lapping, coupled with continuous dissection of my performance by the excellent Panoz instructors—the school cars even had data acquisition systems that graphed every lap—to get me to the point where I was remotely ready to go really fast again. Alas, it was a two-day rather than two-week course. I clearly needed the latter.

But even if you’re a first-timer at driving school, that initial experience of getting on the limit will be unforgettable. It’s a new place entirely and, once glimpsed, provides you with both a fresh respect for driving and a higher level of satisfaction.

You will tread the thin line that separates hero and heartbreak. You will learn that, on a racetrack, you’re out there with co-conspirators who have accepted the risks and signed the liability waiver. Go ahead, spin out. But on the road, operating among moms in minivans and kids on bikes and a whole population of unskilled, uninterested drivers, you need more than good judgment. You need every last iota of skill.