John Ross
04-02-2007, 01:46 PM
New guy here with the silver '07 I got 3 weeks ago. 1100 miles so far, no WOT, 4000 RPM tops. Love the car.
Thursday afternoon I'm headed East on US40 in St. Louis, doing 60 in the middle of 3 lanes. Traffic is fairly light, with some clumps of cars. There's a guy going maybe 55 in the left lane up ahead of me, and I stay in my lane as there's no reason not to. No one else immediately around us.
When I am about ONE CAR LENGTH behind this guy (and to his right, of course), some kind of pickup comes roaring past me in the left lane, slams on his brakes before hitting the other car, and wrenches his wheel to the right because if he hadn't, he would have rearended the left lane guy, hard.
It was instinct to simultaneously wrench my wheel right and nail the brakes as this pickup filled my windshield sideways right in front of me. My car missed his front corner by less than a foot, ABS pulsing. I'd estimate all this happened in maybe a second.
It felt like my SRT rotated about 30 degrees as it passed the pickup and ended up in the right lane. When I was past the pickup I straightened it out at about 40 MPH and looked in my rearview mirror. The pickup had spun about 270 degrees without hitting anything(!) and other cars were far enough back to slow and make their way around it.
I've tried to analyze how my SRT behaved during the most violent maneuver I have ever made, on or off a roadrace track. I THINK the tires reached the limit of their grip, and when that happened, I felt the rotation (roadracers will know what I mean by that) and by then the SC system did its magic and got the car under complete control.
Anyway, I eventually intend to find a big empty parking lot and experiment with what it will do during abrupt maneuvers with SC on and 90% off, but this one event has me convinced the brake engineers at DC have their acts together.
JR
Thursday afternoon I'm headed East on US40 in St. Louis, doing 60 in the middle of 3 lanes. Traffic is fairly light, with some clumps of cars. There's a guy going maybe 55 in the left lane up ahead of me, and I stay in my lane as there's no reason not to. No one else immediately around us.
When I am about ONE CAR LENGTH behind this guy (and to his right, of course), some kind of pickup comes roaring past me in the left lane, slams on his brakes before hitting the other car, and wrenches his wheel to the right because if he hadn't, he would have rearended the left lane guy, hard.
It was instinct to simultaneously wrench my wheel right and nail the brakes as this pickup filled my windshield sideways right in front of me. My car missed his front corner by less than a foot, ABS pulsing. I'd estimate all this happened in maybe a second.
It felt like my SRT rotated about 30 degrees as it passed the pickup and ended up in the right lane. When I was past the pickup I straightened it out at about 40 MPH and looked in my rearview mirror. The pickup had spun about 270 degrees without hitting anything(!) and other cars were far enough back to slow and make their way around it.
I've tried to analyze how my SRT behaved during the most violent maneuver I have ever made, on or off a roadrace track. I THINK the tires reached the limit of their grip, and when that happened, I felt the rotation (roadracers will know what I mean by that) and by then the SC system did its magic and got the car under complete control.
Anyway, I eventually intend to find a big empty parking lot and experiment with what it will do during abrupt maneuvers with SC on and 90% off, but this one event has me convinced the brake engineers at DC have their acts together.
JR