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Never trust car salesmen or smart people

Posted by Uncle Mark | February 17, 2009 | In contributing editors humor mitsubishi

There are only two rules that I try to live my life by and they are:

(1) Never start a land war in South East Asia
(2) Don’t mess around with a married woman

Now, I am afraid that I am going to have to add a third rule to the list:

(3) Never trust car salesmen or smart people

On a trip back to my beloved homeland, I decided that purely in the interest of you, our beloved readers, I would test drive a few of my favorite cars for your blogging pleasure. This led me to revisiting one of my favorite automobile fantasies, the Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution.

Now, in the days when I was a road warrior, driving circa 40,000 miles a year, I seriously considered buying an Evo 8 but was put off by the nearly $80,000 price tag for the FQ and the fact that it would always be in the shop (it had a service interval of 6,000 miles)! However, driving it was about as much fun as you could ever get with your clothes on. So, when I heard that the new Evo (10) was out, I had to drive one, and it did not disappoint! Truvelo speed camera

Yes, there were a few moments when I felt that, if I actually bought one, I would be knocking on the pearly gates within a few weeks, but WHAT a way to go out! It honestly is the ultimate driving machine and you should drive one at least once before you die if you truly believe you are a petrol head.

Anyway, what has this got to do with rule number three, I hear you ask? Well….the salesman, all quaff, cufflinks and s*it eating grins, told me that I really had to see what this car could do, and so encouraged me to drive it as fast as possible through one of the speed cameras that plague the roads of Britain.

Now, being a law-abiding, never-over-70-mph-officer-unless-on-a-race-track type of guy, I of course said no way. However, he decided to show me anyway and proceeded to drive at 135mph past one of the infamous yellow perils, which happily flashed away at us with him looking totally unflustered and my trouser turning a lovely shade of brown.
I get home and am recounting this story to my mates in the pub (I was about three Guinness in, so by this time, we may have hit 155mph) when one of my friends (a boffin with at least a couple of PhD’s) told me that my story was impossible and that we would have had to have been travelling at at least 217 mph not to be caught by the camera, lose our licenses and be thrown in jail for a very long time. The exactness made it sound very fishy, but he looked very sure of himself and sounded very convincing, so cue silence quickly followed by a few more pints.

Well, the truth is that both of them were wrong: you actually have to be going 175mph in order to out race the shutter of a ‘Gatso’ speed camera (still in the shite), but as they cannot prove that I was driving at the time, I can (probably) keep my license.

The moral of the story: America, please don’t start installing these bloody things all over the USA as they’ll only cause trouble.

Love,
Uncle Mark

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