when passion drives you

I was having a tremendous chat to a friend the other day about how much driving on public roads shits me to tears and…ok, ok. I was ranting at a friend while he stood there and kindly allowed me to angrily chew his ear off. Anyway, while he understood my frustrations and could relate to my pet peeves in regards to our fellow road users, he said something that hit me right in the side of the head like a knee from Anderson Silva. “Dave, we couldn’t possibly up the speed limit on our highways to 140km/h, that’s for racing drivers.”

Racing drivers? WHAT? Now I should probably point out he was playing devil’s advocate here, otherwise known as taking the piss, because he himself is a car guy. But he did have a legitimate point; most people that we share our great expanses of black-top with, I believe, would be of the view that to drive over 100km/h, change lanes at ‘high speed’, go through slip-lanes without coming to a complete halt, take roundabouts in third gear and generally drive in a defensive fashion that indicates that you not only know where you are going but that your brain also supports the cognitive capacity to handle the skills involved with getting to a destination in a timely and reasonable manner, that you must be a racing driver (or possibly a reckless idiot).

While we yelled at each other, I remembered an example of this very same discussion. Not terribly long ago Mr V8 Supercars, Mark Skaife, suggested that as part of a plan to educate drivers and improve driver skill and road safety we could eventually consider upping our speed limits to over 100km/h on our major arterials. He, and his ideas, were pushed aside and dismissed as silly and irresponsible. Public reaction included the posting of these educated and helpful gems on Skaife’s own website: “This is absurd, people can’t drive well now as it is.” “Mark Skaife if you want speed and new cars (you can afford them after making money from hoon heads) why don’t you go back to Germany and stay there.” “For goodness sake Skaife, your colleague Peter Brock died because of speed, road conditions and irresponsibly had a lack of sleep.”

Brilliant! All first class responses that illustrate how best to completely miss a point.

I guess what I’m saying is, if you think having an advanced, if not competent, level of driver skill is only for racing drivers than you are an idiot. The reality is this, racing driver or not, the more skill, experience, education and practice you can get, the better you will be. Obviously this doesn’t make you infallible, even racing drivers have crashes. But if you seriously think driving a car at 140km/h is only the territory of racing drivers then please, for the safety of every other road user, take your license out, cut it up and never ever get behind the wheel of a car again. Ever.

For more on Mark Skaife’s road safety plan watch this: http://au.news.yahoo.com/sunday-night/video/watch/20436123/

Dave