Sh*t Your Pants Behind The Wheel?

[SlimKlim]

Luckily it was on a long off ramp so I had plenty of time to slow down with the rear brake. It was crazy because I reached for the brake, then futilely pumped my hand in the air a few times, then I looked down and didn't see a lever, then it was like "OH SHIT".

Jesus.

I personally haven't ever had a really bad pants-shitting scary moments. I've had dozens of small altercations and made lots of stupid mistakes but luckily none of them ended badly.

There's one memorable story also involving no brakes but it was more frustrating than scary.

When I was working at the shop this woman that was a friend of my boss and in a tough spot financially brought in her old jalopy hyundai that was inches from death's door. I don't remember everything wrong with it, but she couldn't afford the parts to repair it and ended up abandoning it with us. Our lot was really small and the shop was always busy so we needed all the parking spaces had, so after it sat for a week someone asked me to move it and warned me it had no brakes. My boss had bought the house right behind the shop from the family of the little old man who had lived there and passed away the year before, so I figured I'd park it in the driveway behind his old car. I got it up there and turned into the driveway at maybe 7mph. Step on the brake pedal and it goes straight to the floor. Fuck. Pull the e-brake and nothing happens. Fuck. I'm going to have a 5mph accident with a parked Monte Carlo. Luckily it was a stickshift so I forced it into reverse, popped the clutch and let it stall and slid to a stop on the gravel. Threw the keys in the center console and walked away. To this day I have no idea how the woman drove it to the shop without causing a bad accident.

Another particularly memorable incident was when the M3 stepped out on an off camber corner in the rain and I almost killed Jake with a ML500.

Or winding out the FZR-600 to 110mph for the first time and realizing how important a good front shock is on a motorcycle when it comes to slowing down.

Or going into a tank slapper at the top of the hill on the Patriot course at VIR.

Or when a tractor trailer blew a tire a few feet in front of us and I had do to full on panic braking on 81 and dodge the huge pieces.

My biggest fear is getting t-boned or rear ended in the M3. Partly because I'm pretty sure if I got t-boned in it I'd die, because side impact protection was still a fairly foreign concept in 1995. And Partly because I've put so much blood, sweat and tears into that thing that it's not really replaceable. The insurance company wouldn't give me a fraction of what I have in it, and even so, I couldn't ever get my car back.

EDIT: The aforementioned tank-slapper at VIR. I guess it wasn't really a tank slapper but goddamn did I pucker up:

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(should start at 1:03)