Family

Ah, race weekend. That twice-a-year celebration of things fast and rumbling that temporarily turns Talladega's outskirts into one of the largest cities in Alabama.

One of the oddities of leaving the race track involves a ritual that is rarely surpassed in highway observance. Thousands of fans are tying to leave at once and funnel their way to the blacktop arteries that leave the speedway. After hours of watching the whir of cars around the track, many fans are compelled to stomp their accelerators the moment they see a hint of open road.

Maybe is the exhaust lingering in their nostrils, or the frustration at sitting in traffic for way too long, but something turns those post-race streets into their own stylistic drag strips.

For law enforcement officials, it's like shooting fish — albeit fast ones — in a narrowly confined barrel.

Further irony comes to us from Kasey Kahne, a young NASCAR star who has come on board an effort to draw attention to the 1,100 or so teens killed or seriously injured annual in Alabama car crashes, according to Allstate's America's Teen Driving Hotspots study.

Kahne recalled that the first time he'd ever received a ticket was not long after he got his highway driver's license. He was leaving a race track, where he'd just taken the checkered flag, so naturally he was excited as he hit the road … and was promptly pulled over for speeding.

"I have since learned that once the race is over, the race is over," Kahne explains as part of the Allstate campaign.

He learned speed will not only get you in trouble with the law, it can also kill.

Unfortunately, he goes on to explain, many teen drivers don't understand that responsibility.

They're driving machines that can turn into mechanized weapons in careless hands. Add in cell phones, a friend or two, or an arguing sibling passenger, and teen drivers can be overwhelmed by the job of keeping a car between the lines.

Kahne is 28, part of a generation that doesn't know that teens of means didn't automatically get cars when they turned 16 (or 15). His parents, though, likely remember when most families had only one car and that farm truck was so rusted and banged up, few teens wanted to rely on it as a mode for cruising around town. Instead, you learned to drive in dull, old sedans that either wouldn't go very fast or were built like tanks.

Take a look at the student parking lot in most of our area high schools. The cars are faster, newer and fancier, in most cases, than the ones the teachers drive.

While the keys may come to teens easily, the experience and responsibility can be slower to arrive.

One driver's ed teacher once told me the best thing that could happen to a 16-year-old was getting a ticket during the first week of independent driving.

It shocks them. It scares them, without injury. It makes Mom and Dad pay attention to the fact that their little Speed Racer may need some time back riding shotgun in Mom's minivan learning what a pro already knows: speed has a time and a place, and cool drivers know it.