There is a comment thread here Chicago Boyz responding to my post on Chicago drivers tearing down the left lane of I290. Someone asked if there was any experience about the experiment of unlimited speeds in Montana (they do have limits at night).
I… uh… found this photo on the internet of someone driving quickly in Montana. Rumor has it that there are many wide open spaces where you can see far ahead and the flat landscape means that there is no where for authorities to find you, should they care to do so.
There are speed limits at night and these are taken seriously; there is an amazing amount of wild life in parts of Montana and you do not want to hit them with your car at high speed.
Once there was a girl I really wanted to see, and I covered 275 miles in 3 hours, crossing a part of Montana. The rate-limiting factor is gasoline. You reach a point where you are burning it so fast you have to keep stopping for more, and your average speed reaches a peak you cannot exceed.
Nevada used to have no speed limit and no fences. What happened when someone hit a wild horse at more than 100 was the operating definition of gross.
“wide open spaces where you can see far ahead and the flat landscape means that there is no where for authorities to find you” as long as you have excellent attention and peripheral vision. In the late 80’s I was approaching Raton, NM, going as fast as the car would, and was overtaken by something going even faster. Soon there was a dust-cloud off to the right in the desert that seemed to be on an intersecting course with the road ahead, and sure-enough in a few miles I found the car that passed me was at the side of the road with a state-trooper behind it.
Have you seen the pics of the Z4 that hit a deer at 140mph on the autoban?
The difference between driving flat-out fast in states like Montana and Wyoming and on the autoban in Germany is that in Germany one has LOTS of company, while here in the US it’s pretty much a solo exercise in the Western States.
Plus one gets “challenged” quite a lot on the autoban. I remember driving a spanking new Marcos 2994cc 3-litre
GT in 1970 at 135 top end when a Lambo pulled up and looked me over. We stayed parallel at those speeds for a while until he tired of toying with me and accelerated OUT OF SIGHT. Must have been doing, oh, 160-180 to disappear that fast. Moral? No matter how fast one is, there’s always somebody quicker on the draw.(besides the cops and a radio)
My uncle had a friend who used to calibrate radar guns for the local police, so he never had trouble getting out of speeding tickets. “Yeah, the radar said I was doing 55 in a 35 zone. Here’s documentation I have of radar guns I calibrated for that very department that were off by more than that.” The courts got to the point where they’d just dismiss the charges whenever he showed up.
The one time he actually got busted was when he got pulled over 3 times on one drive by the 2 officers in the county, going well over 100 mph each time. They made it a point to have an airtight case against him that time… road measurements, freshly-calibrated radar guns, radio communication and times between getting pulled over in different areas, all to prove the guy was way way over the limit.
Actually, Montana enacted a maximum speed limit in 1999. Prior to that, while there was no statutory limit, speed had to be reasonable for the conditions.
http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/?q=montana+has+no+speed+limit&l=1