The unquestionable height of endurance racing was from 1964 to 1973, not only for the fierceness of the Ferrari-Ford, Ferrari-Porsche, and Ferrari-Matra rivalries, but also for the deadly beauty of the cars involved, like 1967's Lola T70 Mk. III.
These Lolas have another tie to the killer side of car racing, in that they were the feature car in the chase scene of George Lucas' first film THX 1138. It is in the questionable worth of chase scenes where we find today's COTD.
While we were watching lone drivers dodging carpooling fines on another classic episode of "People Behaving Badly," Dolemite questioned the safety of this cop's mid-traffic excursion.
This is a real system? A cop jumping out into traffic and pointing at random people? This seems terrible. Not only for the safety of the officer, but people are really supposed to be looking over 1-2 lanes for directions from a cop instead of paying attention in fast moving bumper-to-bumper traffic?
There were a number of excellent responses, a personal favorite being that of the charmingly-titled bag0dicks.
They do this for the carpool lanes around Vancouver as well. I almost hit a cop once. Was legally driving in carpool lane (four people), cop jumped out in front of me while i'm doing almost 60 mph to get a car in the next lane over who had been in the carpool lane. Thing was, this was late summer, around 8:30pm or so and we were heading west straight into the sun. It really was dumb luck that I actually saw the cop, hit the brakes hard... he actually had to run backwards a bit to avoid getting bumped... he came over all in a huff and yelling "what the hell are you doing!!? I was full of adrenaline because I had just almost killed a cop and I yelled right back at him "Are you f'n crazy!!! You're jumping out into 60 mph traffic while we're driving straight into the sun!! I almost didn't see at all!!! You're lucky to be f'n alive right now!!!". He slowly looks towards west, kinda looks around a bit (I think realizing the situation), looks back at me... "ok, son, just move along and pay more attention next time." Haha, right... idiot. I think he just reminded himself that he needed to pay more attention to his surroundings.
It seems that every job done by a police officer on the highway involves some risk to the officers and the other drivers on the road. Do we look forward to a future where speeding cars and lone drivers in the carpool lane can be remotely shut down and fined by a central transportation routing service, or do we accept today's highly flawed, yet fairly open system of cops chasing criminals?
Photo Credit: Nicolas Garcia