"You haven't lived until you've heard a live police chase on a car radio...in a car you're driving."
-Danny Bonnaduce, a/k/a Danny Patridge, VH1 100 Top Child Stars
Maximum Street Speed Explained, Part III
By Jack Baruth
It was just another day at the “Tail Of The Dragon” for the group of experienced sportbikers clustering around the Robbinsville, NC, gas station. Fresh from multiple high-speed runs down the famed road, they were reliving their victories when a long-haired old man in some girly convertible asked them to “show him the fast way through.”
“Fuck off. We don’t wait for old cagers,” was the reply.
As fate would have it, they didn’t have to. Five of the six knee-draggers had to yield to that old man in his Porsche-with-panties before the halfway point.
The sixth and fastest made a mistake, went off, and snapped his fairing into three pieces.
The nice old man stopped and helped him carry his bodywork to the “Tree of Shame” at the Dragon’s end.
Contrary to what you read in Car and Driver, we can’t drive “10/10ths” on back roads. In Speed Secrets, Ross Bentley talks about the bell curve of tire traction. The more we ask from the tires, the more we get . . . but as we reach the limit of traction, the rate of slip increases. As we pass the “peak” of traction, the tires “fall off” at the same rate . . . but now we have no safety margin for gravel, road waves, animals, and whatnot.
We need to stay on the safer side of the tire-traction curve. That means we drive up to the audible squeal but not past it. To make this happen, we drive what I call the “Safe Line.” This is what I teach to novice racing students, and it’s the only “racing line” we can use on back roads.
Approach each turn at the very outside edge of the pavement. For right-handers, this means either the edge of the double-yellow or the far edge of the road, depending on your vision and personal risk tolerance. Brake in a solid, single swift motion, “squeezing on” and “easing off.” If you over-slow the car, that’s fine. Wait longer next time. But don’t re-accelerate this time.
When you have completed braking, turn your head past the “clipping point” of the turn, which is either the inside curb or the double-yellow, focus on the exit, and make a single turn-in motion. Keep constant throttle until you reach the clipping point, then unwind the steering wheel before applying throttle for the exit.
Since we are not on a racetrack, we don’t trail-brake, we don’t “adjust” the car in mid-corner with left-foot braking or throttle inputs, and we don’t even think about applying power until the car is pointed properly to the exit. Most importantly, we take the absolute latest apex, which is to say that we wait as long as possible to turn the car into the corner before turning sharply. This reduces mid-corner speed, but it also reduces inadvertent corner exits.
To do this quickly, you need “traction sensing”: the ability to guesstimate potential corner speed the first time you see a turn. I can’t give that to you. You’ll have to earn it over time by steadily increasing the speed at which you approach known corners until something goes wrong.
Racetrack time doesn’t help much here. Racetracks don’t have pavement waves, big bumps, salt, gravel, dead animals, or Amish people in horse-drawn carriages.
If you see any of those, you’re either on the road, or you’re at Nelson Ledges Road Course for a “Friday Funday.” Forget what you know about on-track traction sensing. You can be an SCCA champion and still finish your first Ohio backroads drive in close proximity to a guardrail or tree. Ask me how I know.
Between corners, we accelerate at full speed until it’s time to brake for the next. The exception to this is when we run “The Pace.” The concept of “The Pace” is an old sportbike maxim: set a maximum speed between corners and treat it as a hard ceiling. On the backroads group drives in which I occasionally run, that ceiling is 110mph. Go faster than that, even for a moment, and you can go home alone. No exceptions.
If you enter a corner too hot, straighten the wheel and apply full ABS. Chances are you will go off, but you will go off slow. If you find yourself “saving” a turn by braking in the middle, guess what? You had enough traction to make it through on the throttle.
When you are in mid-air from a “whoop,” do not hit the brakes. Relax your hands and make sure your thumbs are clear of the steering, and keep the throttle at the same place you had when you left the ground. Oh, yeah: keep your eyes up for other road users and treat ’em with courtesy, of course. Pass with care.
Part IV is the finale, in which we discuss suburban and urban techniques.
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Maximum Street Speed Explained, Part II
By Jack Baruth
The über-wealthy have many fascinating ways to speed on America’s highways, from night-vision goggles to convenient spotter planes overhead. But those of us who toil in the middle class have to earn our velocity by hard graft. Freeway speeding is the crack cocaine of fast-road driving—cheap, easy, addictive, and deadly—and nighttime freeway speeding is both more glamorous and annoying than its daytime counterpart.
Once the sun goes down, we can do a lot more of that left-lane passing which is so near and dear to the hearts of wannabe Europeans, thanks to a trick I call “Poor Man’s Takedown.” Cop cars have “takedown” lights: high beams which flash alternately. We can simulate the effect as follows: While coming up behind traffic in the left lane, switch to parking lights only. When you are a few hundred feet back, flash your brights three or four times, producing the “takedown” effect. As Billy Dee Williams would say, “It works every time,” primarily because it startles Toyota drivers into yielding the lane before their natural territorial instincts can assert themselves.
We don’t use the shoulder at night unless we have to. Confused deer, abandoned cars, and discarded retreads tend to hide out there. In the event that a lane-changing fellow motorist leaves us with no safe lane choice and no time to slow the car, it’s occasionally possible to simply split the lane on the side away from the lateral direction of the lane change. If you are swift enough with it, you might even keep your mirrors.
The time will come when, despite our best efforts to look ahead, watch brake lights, and use our Valentine Ones, we will be clocked. At this point, we have two useful options. We can pull over and wait for the nice policeman, right there across the road from his clocking point (this will sometimes earn us some goodwill), or we can run.
It isn’t really “running” until the cop is directly behind us with his lights on. That’s a felony, and I advise against it. Until then, it’s merely additional speeding, spiced up with some unwarranted direction-changing. When we decide to perform said additional speeding, we need to absolutely abandon the idea of getting where we were going. That’s no longer important. Instead, we need to perform three important tasks.
Task one is breaking visual contact. As long as the cop can see us, we are toast. So it’s time to boogie. Most police sedans with light bars can’t break 120 mph, so we want to get to that speed or better immediately. We look ahead, not behind, or we will surely drive right into the back of a lane-wandering minivan full of multicultural children stroking crippled kittens and singing “Kumbaya.” We can check our mirrors in the gaps between traffic.
With Task One accomplished, it’s time to multiply possibilities. The police handbooks indicate that fleeing drivers almost always turn right. So we get off the freeway and turn left. If we have enough clear air and we aren’t driving something like a lime green Audi S5 or other memorable car, we can cross the median and join the lawful traffic heading in the other direction. If that’s too much to ask, get off the freeway . . . but do it quickly. We keep our speed up, using the techniques I’ll cover in Part III, and we make multiple direction changes.
After a few of these, it’s time to abandon the whip. We get out of the car and walk away. A gas station is fine for this, a restaurant is better, a car lot is best of all. If you have, ahem, a new Ford Flex, why not drive into a Ford dealership and park in a line of them? Then get away from the car. Guess what? If they can’t prove we were driving the car, we have a fighting chance in court.
If the police manage to catch us, we say we didn’t see them and that we always drive like a maniac. This abject confession of putative stupidity saved, um, a friend of mine from a beating after he led the Ohio Highway Patrol on a 120+ mph chase down Route 71 in a Lotus Seven clone. Sorry, officer! Didn’t see you back there! Gimme the ticket, I’ll sign it!
In cities, we return to the scene of the crime. Police search in an outward circle that expands with time. The one place they won’t be is the place where the search started, so we go there, using left turns. Needless to say, we don’t go speeding with weed, Ecstasy, firearms, or illegal immigrants in the car, because one felony charge at a time is enough.
Mugshot of multibillionaire Bill Gates, richest man in America*
In Part III, we will learn how to drive back roads at outrageous speeds.
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Editorial: Maximum Street Speed Explained
Why I Posted Jack Baruth’s Maximum Street Speed Editorials
Amazing Porsche made out of packing tape
"The MAINTAIN TOP SAFE SPEED sign may be used on highways where conditions are such that it is prudent to traverse an area as quickly as possible."
—USDOT, FHA, Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, Chapter 2I. Emergency Management Signing, 2003 Ed
*Not counting trillionaire jewish banksters who own the private "Federal" Reserve Bank that counterfeit all so-called "US dollar bills" and keep all income taxes, with immunity from arrest by 1-million traffic cops.
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