Q – How do you find a high speed shake driving the car around town? Do you take the car out on the freeway? Rick
A – As a professional, in the interest of science, I have to drive cars faster than most folks do. I have a spot where there is a mile of straight road, few entrances to that road, few homes on the road and very limited places for the authorities to hide. I go about a half mile down, there is a little rise in the road where I can see a half mile in both directions, when there is no traffic, I pull out and do full throttle red line acceleration tests then full braking, short of lock up, stops from triple digits. I brake down to the limit, accelerate back up and try a second stop from a high speed while holding the steering wheel with a light touch to check for pulling or vibration. MC
Q – That sounds dangerous. Do you ever get tickets? Rick
A – Sooner or later, odds are a ticket is likely but generally the local officers know what I am up to and they usually let me off with a warning. Once I was test driving a supercharged Miata and it was fast. I accelerated hard, stopped equally hard and pulled it to let it idle. He was right behind me. His comment was “do you know how fast you were going?”, to which I replied “no, I was watching traffic and paying more attention to the engine since we just finished this car”. I popped the hood and showed him the install and he was interested to see what was under the hood than in writing a ticket. I know a number of police officers who are motorheads too.
There is one circumstance that they have warned me about which will always result in a ticket. If I have a passenger, they have to ticket me. I remember one incident where one of our members wanted me to test drive his car and wanted to go with me. I got pulled over and got the ticket. He was very amused by that. I did not find it as funny. It could have been that he had been in a similar situation and also got a ticket. You could say that it was a memorable event for both of us and he would frequently remind me of it.
Dennis Szeremet, our dear departed 928 fanatic, loved doing burn outs in his Gold Weissach Edition 928. He always left my establishment in a memorable way by leaving two long, ten inch wide, black rubber stripes on the parking lot. He knew he would not get a ticket on private property when he had the owner’s permission. MC