Oh I'm actually particularly tame on the roads... The Porsche is roll-caged, harnessed, and really only sees track-duty nowadays. -One of the adjoining counties (Lake county) has a particularly well set-up police driver training centre, with a skid-pad, a reconfigurable auto-cross "cones-in-a-parking-lot" area (with NO lamp posts!), and a similarly reconfigurable road circuit, for time-trial racing (as opposed to wheel-to-wheel paint-trading). The local chapter of the PCA (owner's club) has an agreement which permits it to rent time there. -By way of further assistance, I recently donated a mixer & amplifier for the PA/Announcement system when their in-house system gave up the ghost for the second time (just out of warranty...) -As a result we're in pretty good favour with the Lake County Police Dept.
-By way of sober comparison, this place is SO WELL equipped that the Orlando, Winter Park, and several other major city police departments (from two counties away) rent time to re-qualify their police patrol car drivers... There's nothing else like it anywhere nearby, and the lake county police department (a supposedly "boon dock" outfit) lightly mock the "Townie" police departments, who have nothing like it. -AND YET the Lake County sheriff himself (who took some pride in the facility) was killed in an accident in Orlando, having been ejected from his vehicle, while not wearing his seat belt...
Public roads are dangerous, and "getting one's thrill on" (with a safety crew in attendance) is so affordable, that it's not worth risking life and limb by mixing excessive speed with pedestrians, potholes, drunks, highway debris and just plain old lousy drivers... So my daily drives (the P-car is not a 'daily') tend to be driven around like I'm a complete wimp. -I've seen too many injuries from inattention, distraction or just plain stupidity. -Last year I chased down a van after it plowed through a red-light and T-boned a Harley rider who was making a 90° turn. The rider was helmet-less and bald-headed, and when his head hit the asphalt, it made a bloody mess. -I was at the head of the waiting traffic, and when the van took off while an off-duty paramedic (as luck would have it) from the car behind me was attending to the biker.
It turned out that the three people in the van were undocumented immigrants, and were certain that if they stuck around they'd be deported, so they tried to run, but I took off after them, leaving the paramedic and a couple of other drivers to attend to the rider. I phoned the emergency operator and dictated the van's license plate... at that point the driver realised what I was doing, slowed, bowed to the inevitable and pulled to the side of the road. -When the police arrived, the three in the van had dismounted from the vehicle, and were milling around. I was parked keeping watch, and spoke to the highway patrol officer when he arrived. -He spoke no Spanish, they spoke no English (or claimed to) but when an interpreter had been found, the constant milling around had confused everyone, and all three were claiming that someone OTHER than themselves was the driver... -In the end all three were handcuffed and taken away for further questioning, and the van was loaded onto a wrecker truck... -The bike was also loaded on, and the rider had been taken away to the hospital. -I have no idea what happened to him, but even if he survived, I've seen too many people have lesser head impacts and be 'slow' or 'not-right' as a result of closed-head injuries... and there was addtionally a LOT of blood this time.
It's experiences like that which make me a bit of a 'pussy' on the public roads. -If anyone wants to run fast, there's a track for that... and you can learn to get better at it while you're there; but NOT on the roads.
Keith