n8rfastback

my first bike was a 78 yamaha 175

i now own an 80' suzuki 750, tscc, jetted with exhaust

i would have killed myself on the 750 had it been my first bike. it still can do more than my experience will let me, but i know my limits

bob

Even a GT Mustang is fast despite what alot of people think. Raise your hand when you remeber a 14 second ride as being respectible on the street.

As of late we have become rather warped in our perceptions about what is fast and what is blindingly fast and then what is crazy fast.

bob

Speaking of things going bad

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080216/..._racing_deaths

ouch!

Mackitraz

Interesting that the driver that struck all those people wasn't charged. While I realize it is certainly not common for folks to be streaming out into a road to watch a race, it is fairly common to have to share the road with all manner of obstacles and to be prepared to respond. If you're going into a fog bank, the common response is to slow down and put your low beams or fog lights on. Doesn't sound like the driver took any appropriate action considering the situation is described as dark and smokey.

It's tragic that a race was the cause of the people to be in the road, but it seems equally tragic that the police aren't concerned that a random driver took out 8 people on a road! If you rear end someone who inadvisedly stopped quickly, you still get a ticket for hitting him, I've never heard of someone striking and killing a pedestrian as getting off with not even a careless driving, failure to yield or some other ticket. That's absurd.

I have sympathy for the driver of the Crown Vic for the fact that people in a dark road is hardly a common event, and probably one that most people will never see. However when you get in a car and drive, you take on the responsibility to pay attention to what's in front of you, from the sounds of the article, he probably didn't, and it sounds like driver negligence, as unfair as it may feel to him. While I would want to know who the racers were too if I were the police, trying to pin it on them is deflecting blame from where it belongs IMHO. There are lots of reasons people can be in a road, why they are there is immaterial, hitting and killing them is not. The racers already have to live with the fact that the event is why those folks were in the road, and they deserve all penalties for racing the law will throw at them, but again, they didn't kill all those people.

And by the way, I'd also like to make it clear that I do not support street racing, especially under those conditions. All those folks should have been in the bleachers of a track cheering on their favorite somewhere safe.

edumspeed

No matter how many unfortunate things happen, many people still don't get it. Think before acting, not act and then think. Common sense isn't all too hard to apply.

And to those dumb, idiotic, money swimming parents who give anything their sons ask without thinking responsibly, like giving them STI Subarus, Suzuki Hayabusas or any high performance machine as their first vehicle, think about how much you really love them ALIVE. You won't be hated by your son forever because you didn't give them the car/bike they wanted, just tell them that they need more experience behind the wheel. Those kids will always want to show off before their friends and do dumb things like speeding on school zones or residential areas. I've seen this happen a lot too often and it pains too much to know that their own parents don't realize the dumb decision they made until it's too late... really sad...

karman

Here is another case recently where the killing drivers were not cited.
http://www.thebostonchannel.com/news...46/detail.html
The investigation of the street racing case found no fault with the Crown Vic driver.
It was reported that the smoke from the cars made it impossible to see the road.
The driver may actually have been slowing down, but you can go pretty slow (under 40 on a highway) into a cloud of smoke and still kill people standing in the middle of the road.
Would you want to stand in the middle of a highway behind a smoke screen and blame somebody for hitting you?
The cops won't.

Mackitraz

First off, I can see where you're going with this, and I definitely think you have a point. Moreover, I'll go even farther to say that I have no idea what the exact particulars of the scene were, and that I certainly don't trust the media to give it to me accurately!

That all being said, on the one hand, you're right, most people don't come to an almost complete stop when entering fog (for instance, as that's what I might think the smoke was if I hadn't smelled the tire smoke) but on the other hand I was reacting to the fact that an eye witness reported that the Crown Vic driver didn't have his lights on and that it would seem to make sense that if the pedestrians could see light behind them coming up (it was dark after all) and if the Crown Vic driver were slowing down, you'd think the pedestrians would have more than a second or two which they seemed to have had to clear the road.

Obviously, you're right, the police seem to have felt the driver couldn't have avoided the situation. It just seems that the police are attempting to find a scapegoat for the situation even though tragically, all those people chose to be there in harms way (except the Crown Vic driver).