Half of it wasn't massively dissimilar to IAM and the like, I was doing police standard rather than police advanced (which is what traffic and other specialist units such as surveillance, firearms, CTU do). More about hazard perception and forethought and being smooth with the controls and all that malarkey. Then again, my instructor did like pushing us...
Doing the actual response driving in a big marked Transit with flashy noisy things was a bit different, though! If you're a petrolhead there's no way you wouldn't love doing it. Unfortunately the thrill of driving quickly on public roads faded for me a fair bit after doing it for a while, nothing quite compares.
We were made to do a 'long run' to get used to what it would be like to do something wholly atypical, bearing in mind that on division in an urban area you'd probably only take 5 minutes to get somewhere. Started at 8ish on a Monday morning, drove in to Manchester city centre (!!) with blues and twos, went all round the houses and ended up somewhere near Stockport. It lasted 43 minutes, I was soaked through with sweat and I was completely cabbaged for the rest of the day.
