The Angry Viking

The Irish Mail on Sunday are “reporting” that Government Ministers and their cars have been cought excesivly speeding… and this is during a week when a load of new “state of the art” Gatso vans where bought…. great. government loosing money, not enough in the exchecker, and they go and blow a lot of money on some new Transit vans….

Right, to start with, your probably thinking whats with all the angryness around cars? Well, i do a lot of driving around Dublin and Ireland in general, and, it has been said that you don’t have to be mad to drive in Dublin, but it helps. You get angry with a lot of people while driving around Dublin; Taxi drivers, Bus drivers, Bus lanes, speed cameras, speed bumps, and generally anything that gets in your way or slows you down.

So, on to the speed part of things. This idea of “Speed Kills”. It doesnt. Think about it. In a crash, the actual thing that kills is usually the sudden deceleration, the object that either hit you or you hut, and the car your traveling in breaking up and causing harm. Look at F1. Robert Kubitza crashed his F1 car doing 180Mph, and survived. Richard Hammond crashed at 288Mph and survived, with injuries to his brain, but is back to being himself.

Back to my point. Speed does not kill. its loosing control of your car at speed that causes problems. its like the idea of falling off a building will kill you. Well, it wont. its the sudden stop at the end, which we can blame gravity for, which actually kills you.