cannon(fodder)ball run

For all your MR2 adventures
Please remember that racing on the public highway is both dangerous and illegal.
The forum Administrator has chosen to advise you that this topic is 7 years and 11 months old and that you may wish to begin a new topic or use the search feature to find a similar but newer topic.
User avatar

Topic author
pbmr2
Posts: 1181
Joined: 17/06/10 1:42
Years of MR2 Ownership: 8
MR2's Owned: 3
Gender: Male

cannon(fodder)ball run

Post by pbmr2 »

Part 1 (post limit, more to follow)

The 2 is off the road for yet more days due to AutoGits canceling leaving me pare-brise less. Then the phone rings at work and the big boss wants a techy visit from his favorite engineer.

Off to the doom machine of a company pool car for me it is then.
There it is beaming in the low hanging early morning sunshine, a 57 plate Astra 1.6 dull-mobile. Low miles (37k), spotless inside and out with a wiff of the local Polish hand carwash. Close the stupidly stiffly spring door, turn the key and, yep more dullness. The dismal drone of a Vauxhall 1.6 eurobox.
No bluetooth hookup for the tunes so stuck with radio!, a stupid built in screen that tries to do everything and fails to do anything or present any useful information in a clear fasion. Oh well at least the fuel is cheap and the journey is only about 110miles round trip.

First roundabout of the day, the traffic is quite heavy and unsure of how well this thing gets away so best be careful. Wait for a large gap and stamp on the loud pedal. There is an imediate lurch forward of about 3/4 a car lengeth and then nothing. Really nothing! By this point the pedal is to the metal and the traffic coming round the driftabout is closing the gap at an alarming rate. I shout "MOVE!" and it sort of shuffles off at an annoyingly sedate rate, clearly now holding up more able traffic. Oh the shame :facepalm:

Join the crazy road system before the motorway and have to change lanes a couple of times. What the hell is going on with the indicators? They self centre and don't ever seem to stay on when you need them or go off when you don't. Right best use them sparingly or they will land me in trouble.

Oh crap another roundabout, ah the gods are on my side this time as it's possible to keep rolling and merge. Phew.

Motorway, this should be easy. 70mph in the inside lane and some radio 2. Things were going well for the first 7 or 8 miles. The instant fuel consumption numbers were keeping me amused and distracted, the car was easy to point in a straight line with one hand but it did sound like I was thrashing it to within an inch of it's life just to maintain 70.

Ah here's the M25, more easy motoring, how wrong I was. :no:
After joining and staying well left and out of the stressed rush hour traffic's way, Mr 44 tonne lorry decides to turn in on me while I'm about 2/3 the way towards the front of his wagon. :shocked:
Horn and lights, quite a lot of both. Nah didn't help he just turned in on me! Off to the hard shoulder it was then and an emergency stop due to an upcoming bridge. FFS not 4 mins of M25 and I'm nearly roadkill already.

Right back to it then, found a gap and managed to sprint out as best the little thing could. Lucky people were not doing normal motorway speeds due to the weight of traffic. Unphased from the attempted lorry crushing I poodle along paying much more attention to people's lane positioning and notice that almost every group of vehicles that were near each other were trying to force the others off the road or out the way.

A few uneventful miles later 2 of the other nutters had crashed into the central wall. Looks like Mr Audi had gone up a lane while Mr Rangerover didn't care or slow down (maybe he sped up, didn't see it happen) which pit maneuvered Mr Audi into the wall and then T-boned him with the large fronted Landy. Both men were standing in the outside lane pointing fingers and shouting at each other :laughing with traffic still doing 50mph inches from them.

J10, up a well known stamp on the brakes zone mostly due to OLM (Outside Lane Morons) darting for the exit slip road within the last hundred yards. And MLM (Middle Lane Morons) pulling out as they join the M25 and just go up 2 or 3 lanes because MLM.
Anyway this was expected, avoided any near misses and noted that the car was managing 55.2mpg at the time.

Heathrow was the next point of excitment. 5 maybe even 6 lanes to fool around on, oh and how they fooled. Every german car was at it, up a lane, under take a couple of cars then back up a lane, ah what the heck make it 2 lanes up.
It was while trying to stay out the way just ploding along in the lowest lane possible while not getting nicked for speeding and avoiding madly driven german cars, that I noticed that the blind spot portion of the mirror was very well named. It is indeed a huge blind spot and is an utter waste of space. Good job this eurobox has side windows to look out of or I'd have pull up a lane to pass a lorry only to be met by a speeding Audi estate diving down multiple lanes to undertake as much traffic as possible at the highest speed possible during rush hour on the M25.

I started to ponder why these cars had 4 rings on the front. Were they lives? Nah he's used that many in the last 30 seconds! Maybe a homage the Greek's Olympic Games for record number of near misses in a single journey? A little far fetched. Ah, got it. They are all driven by "censored", so it must be 4 custard cream rings. Yeah that must be it, the 4 custard cream rings of the apocalypse.

Grinning a little to myself I spotted a 3 series flying round the sliproad that was about to join my lane. Lift off the power and create much more of gap for him and out he flies into the lane. He almost forces his way up to the next lane but another driver saw him coming and couldn't afford to lose another place in the human race, so had put his foot down to firmly close that door. This caused Mr BMW to stamp on his brakes really quite hard! Much harder than was needed. Squeeky bum time! Good job I'd made that gap a lot bigger and slowed down a little already. Fools the lot of them.

He forced his way infront of a mondeo and then up to lane 3 and then slammed on his brakes again. This time beause all the other OLMs had clogged up the outside lane and the cosy inside lane was now much faster. bye bye for now.


"Time is the true wealth, spend it well."

Rev4 T-bar gen4 swap
Rev4 Moonroof 3sge daily

Quick Reply

   
The forum Administrator has chosen to advise you that this topic is 7 years and 11 months old and that you may wish to begin a new topic or use the search feature to find a similar but newer topic.

Return to “The Spirited Driving Chronicles”