Tom wrote:
I agree with all the speed limits in Britain because, lets face it, it is very hard to drive a car at any speed if you do it right.
That’s the crucial point indeed, most of people don’t have the perception of car limits, and most important, of their own limits, at high speed and that’s the main cause of most of accidents. You can’t imagine how many ricers I saw coming here from everywhere in Europe wanting to drive their “fast & furious” like cars on the track, fully convinced they were the best drivers ever, just to plant the car on the wall at the first corner.
The most revealing example is for me braking because as much as people know from driving school that braking distance increases way more than linearly with speed, they rarely experience it so also at high speed they are convinced there’s lot in reserve in term of braking potential; when a very hard braking at high speed is required they aren’t prepared for it and the usual result is a crash.
I talk by personal experience because that’s exactly what impressed me the most the first time I made laps on the track, with road car, as passenger with a professional driver at the wheel. It was about 10 years ago, I was 18-19 at the time, and the car was a Fiat Coupe 2.0 turbo, not fastest car ever but with an excellent Brembo braking system, lot better than average. After a few corners at slow pace he started to push hard at Lesmo 2 exit down to Ascari, we were going at about 180-185 km/h when, well before the point where old oval passes over the track he started to brake. My initial thought was “no, he’s already braking, he’s taking it easy”. Well, trust me, had he started just 10 m later we would have been straight on the gravel trap, he was braking very hard the whole time and we certainly didn’t enter Ascari at slow speed...
Since then I made lot more laps on track as passenger and also drove a few times myself and it always take me a while for getting used to the difference between braking on the road at low speed and braking on the track.
My opinion is that a few laps as passenger on a circuit should be mandatory for all the guys taking driving license, it would be an eye opener showing how difficult is to drive fast and the completely different world you are going in when speed is high.
Obviously that’s never going to happen because the “people who know everything”, believe that it would be instigation to fast driving and would create desire of emulation on the road. I tried it, it’s exactly the opposite.
Scuderia_Russ wrote:
Have you got speed cameras in Italy and the U.S. yet?
Yes, since some years now. Obviously there are often complains exactly because you can’t know who’s driving and in the past many fines were cancelled on that basis. At the moment, if I’m not mistaken (didn’t happen recently), they send the pic to the car’s owner asking him to tell who was driving. If he refuses to do, he gets a fine (lot higher than that for speeding) but no points subtraction, if he does the driver gets the fine for speeding and the points subtraction.
When I say points subtraction it’s because we have, since 2003, a points based system. You have as a start 20 points and for each infraction you get a fine AND you lose a given amount of points depending on the infraction (2 points for “normal” speeding, 2 or 3 points for driving without safety belts, 5 for using cell phone without hand free system etc etc).
Once you run out points you lose the driving license and to recuperate it you have to follow an update course. Every couple of years, if you didn’t commit further infractions during that time, you get 2 points back.
