Driving Fast Through Traffic

FossilMedic fondly recalls: 

Driving Fast Through Traffic,
with flashing red lights and a screaming siren

When I started working full-time at the community college, the dean asked what I missed most about my old job. I told her that it was driving fast through traffic, with flashing red lights and a screaming siren. She said that I had a great sense of humor and shared that nugget with everyone.  Small problem, I was not kidding.

Probie dreams and geezer memories

One of my retirement presents was a three day driving program at the Bondurant School of High Performance Driving [ http://www.bondurant.com/ ].  It was everything I hoped it would be. The last day had us driving as fast as we could on a small road course in road racing Mustangs. It must have been the attention deficit disorder, but after three laps I found myself looking for the siren switch.

[photopress:mike_108_b.jpg,full,centered]
[photopress:mike_108_a.jpg,full,centered] 

It was an “ah-ha” experience that still haunts me. I have subsequently taken speed vacations, driving high performance cars in the desert north of Las Vegas. It is still more exciting for me to thread the needle on traffic-choked streets in a 135,000 mile, diesel powered four-wheel-drive Suburban than reduce my elapsed lap time in a racing Mustang or rocket through Red Rocks. At least if the Suburban was responding Code 3 to an incident.

[photopress:mike_108_c.jpg,full,centered]

Re-mastered high speed movie classics

There were three movies during my adolescence and early adult years that contributed to this illness: Grand Prix (1966), Bullitt (1968) and Le Mans (1971). Later, the original Blues Brothers (1980) added to this speed addiction. All four featured real-time high speed driving either on race tracks or the streets of San Francisco and Chicago. No computer graphics or speeded-up film, both films showed cars careening through the (police controlled) streets at one hundred miles an hour. Two years I go I reprised the McQueen San Francisco chase in a brand new Hertz Shelby GT-H, but averaged 27 miles an hour.

[photopress:mike_108_hertz_shelby.jpg,full,centered]

This winter carnival I received anniversary DVDs of Bullitt and Blues Brothers, with additional footage covering the details of how the chase scenes were made. It was fascinating, but took away some of the excitement, as I was looking for the hit men’s Charger to overshoot the gas station just before the pyrotechnics and noticed other smaller “oops.”

[photopress:mike_108_e2.jpg,full,centered]

Enthusiasts say that “C’etait un Rendezvous” makes Bullitt look like a cartoon. Director Claude LeLouche placed a camera on the nose of his car and, at 5:30 am in 1976, screamed through the streets of Paris. No police controlled intersections, it is a breathtaking nine minutes of speed.

[photopress:mike_108_f.gif,full,centered]

In all cases, the drivers buckled-up before starting the chase. In fact, McQueen’s Bullitt used the buckling up scene as a building element before the chase started in San Francisco. I hope you emulate McQueen before you hit the siren switch.

[photopress:mike_108_d.jpg,full,centered]