I put "safe" in quotation marks, indicating it was safe to the extent that there was room, with a car length behind and ahead, not actually safe. That is how most people drive in town, or with less room, and would have been safe if the truck had not sped up to try to block her.
You have no idea what kind of driver I am, that's not me in the car. I would not have tried to pass, and if I did you better believe it would have been faster and more complete than the driver here. I have consistently said she was unsafe to do what she did. You can drop the ad hom for me too, I've been driving for over 28 years including 5 years of delivery service, with one accident due to black ice (no one else involved) and I did off road racing for years as well. I'm almost a professional driver, how about you?
Not having a cell phone law making it illegal, and it being the reason you lose a civil suit have little to do with each other. It's proven that it's unsafe to do, no matter what your state law is on the subject.
Once again, she was unsafe, as was the trucker. The trucker intentionally made it more unsafe and caused an accident he could and should have easily avoided. No matter what else you argue, that makes it 100% his fault in my state.

Not at all. Just watch any monster truck freestyle competition and you'll see clearly that even with the best equipment and engineers, they break nearly every time...except for the trucks that score less than 10 out of 30 points. If you aren't breaking some stuff, you aren't flying high enough or hitting that wall of cars hard enough. Simple as that. True enough, they often leave the big jump(s) for right at the end of their time, or even after time's up, knowing it may end with them driving a tricycle or worse....and then again, sometimes that doesn't slow them down much. It all depends on the truck's design and the driver.
When I did off road racing, I always put the sentiment another way. "If you aren't bleeding, you aren't really trying." I had my rear tire/wheel pass me numerous times after a hard jump. It just happens. Even chromemoly is only a little stronger than regular steel, and stub axles only come so big. It's one of those things where you just have to make the weak point an easy fix, because there's always going to be a weak point.

...but if you were talking about his 4x4 truck, not monster trucks....never mind! :-)

Yeah, when the car weighs nothing, it doesn't take much power to go fast! It's all about power to weight ratio. These cars come close to the power to weight ratio of Nascar cars weighing 3500lbs with 750hp, these weigh 1025 and use 1.6liter water cooled VW motors, making it possible that they have a better power to weight ratio than Nascar, and they definitely handle better.
My off road race buggy had a weight requirement to be at least 1500lbs, I had to add lead weights. Even at that, a 1776 VW race motor almost had it do wheelies! The light weight makes for better handling too, but it also means once you lose traction, it's unlikely you'll get it back. In off road, it also means higher jumps and softer landings.

Notice the interior is all metal, I would bet it's designed to just hose out.
EDIT: that's how off road race cars are designed, and they had a fire hose at short track races to remove mud between heats.
It's always good when your passenger needs to ride the hood for traction, and the driver needs to remove the seatbelt to breathe!
I'll give you my first....
*quality

What the hell? Since when do people not stand right on the roadway? That's the first rally I've seen where they even tried to keep people off the road. Is this a new thing?
In off road racing we had to consider those people 'bushes with clothes on'. If you think of them as people lining the track, there's no way you can go full speed with confidence. I hated that.

I often feel the same way about off road racing, especially since so many spectators like to stand ON the course (just like they do in the Man TTs). The same goes for rally racing. I just can't understand how it's still allowed in today's 'safety conscious' world, but I'm sure glad it is.

If you mean when they aren't racing, in F1 they completely dis-assemble the car bolt by bolt and check every piece for micro cracks and wear, rebuild the engine and transaxle, replace any worn part, and basically rebuild the car from scratch...almost every time. They also do experimentation with new parts and designs to see if they are worth integrating into the car. With the stresses these parts see in F1 racing, they have to be insanely careful to not put a cracked or poorly made part on, it could easily kill someone if anything fails.
Most of what wins races happens OFF the race course. I was an off road/desert racer, and it was even truer there. Just finishing in off road racing is a victory, and it's mostly due to proper preparation of the car. Being a lone wolf 'team' (meaning I had no pit crew, it was all on me and whatever 'friend' I could rope into helping at the race) it was pretty self gratifying when I was able to drive into the pits at the end of a race (as opposed to being towed or dragged in).

>> ^Krupo:


Yeah, you're lucky he didn't just give you a citation for not keeping your mouth shut. Dude, they're cheap. Like one big imported beer cheap. You don't need a mega-strong $200 off-road racing lamp.
http://www.mec.ca/
Products/product_detail.jsp?PRODUCT%3C%3Eprd_id=845524442588127&FOLDER%3C%3Efolder_id=2534374302692895


Like i said, i was a whiner. And frankly, considering how poor i was and how rarely i rode my bike and wasn't even in traffic, i'd much rather have saved the dough for one big imported beer. Gotta have priorities.

>> ^nadabu:

I was once warned by a cop not to ride without a headlight at night on my bike once. Fair 'nuf, but i was in well-lit park, not even on a proper road. He said that's why it was just a warning. Being a whiner, i still complained that i was a poor college student and rarely rode my bike (i walked and bused mostly), so dishing out cash for a light was hard. He suggested i ride holding a flashlight. Yeah... 'cause carrying a flashlight in one hand while steering a bike will really make me safer.


Yeah, you're lucky he didn't just give you a citation for not keeping your mouth shut. Dude, they're cheap. Like one big imported beer cheap. You don't need a mega-strong $200 off-road racing lamp.

http://www.mec.ca/Products/product_detail.jsp?PRODUCT%3C%3Eprd_id=845524442588127&FOLDER%3C%3Efolder_id=2534374302692895

I still chuckle over that Salvia off-road race...

It seems the same to me as you would get with a car with really soft suspension. The soft suspension gives you more grip, but it also means very slow weight transfer which makes the handling much worse (slow to react to steering input). I don't know if this really caries over to off-road vehicles though. I guess.

It does look like a similar layout to those off-road racing cars/trucks though, so maybe it is a good thing. I could also imagine that the slow weight transfer could have a tendency to throw you off if you were to hit a bump or something while it's still leaning the wrong way.