One afternoon in the early 1970s, while driving home from work (twenty-five miles on the freeway from where I worked near Everett to Seattle), as I was accelerating down the on-ramp to the freeway, a burly guy in a red Pontiac Firebird (muscle car—I was driving a Toyota Corona, not a muscle car) was about three feet off my rear bumper. I wanted to get out of this guy's way, and since I was going to be on the freeway for some miles, I checked to my left, saw no cars for several hundred feet, and cut diagonally toward the left (express) lane. When I got to the express lane, to my horror, I see this moron passing me on MY left—on the shoulder of the road. And he shot me a dirty look.

He was driving a hot car, and he wasn't going to have some stinkin' little Toyota beating him to the fast lane!

I held a steady 70 mph, the legal speed on this highway at the time, and maintained the correct distance from other cars. In the meantime, I watched this dude's progress.

If he had a clear stretch of the road, he accelerated, exceeding the speed limit, until he wound up tailgating someone. When he got the chance he would shoot around then and go to warp speed until he was tailgating someone else. He was a messy accident looking for a place to happen.

Over the twenty-five miles, he was never more than two block's distance ahead of me.

And the cute part was that he headed for the same off-ramp that I normally take.

There was a stop light at the end of the off-ramp.   Several cars were taking that same exit, and for all his risky, dangerous driving, he was only two cars ahead of me at the light!

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I've had this situation a number of times. I'm on a freeway approaching the off-ramp I want to take and I'm moving to the right in preparation. But there is some guy in the right-hand lane I want to move to hanging right off my right rear quarter-panel, much too close. I speed up, he speeds up. I slow down, he slows down.

So I turn on my right turn signal and suddenly speed up. Then HE floors it to get ahead of me. Damned dangerous thing for him to do, if I were to actually change lanes right then, But I let him, then quickly move in behind him and take the off-ramp I want.

I just want to get him the hell out of my way!

Not speed and aggression. Tactics!

Don Firth