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Comment by 8note | Hacker News Reader

when do you run things over when racing?

You don't. You also don't kill things when you target shoot. You can run over things with a car, or you can race one. You can kill things with a gun, or you can shoot paper targets with one. Get it?

The analogy is really stretched. The racing sport equivalent to target shooting would be running over paper targets.

That's not an analogy, that's trying to directly apply the sport to another device. That would be like saying an analogy to soccer is kicking basketballs into hoops. The most natural thing to do with a car is to drive it and the most natural thing to do with a gun is to fire it. And running over paper targets instead of racing would probably be an improvement in motorsport safety ;)

the most natural thing to do with a car isn't to run people down though, it's to travel from one place to another.

target practice is to racing, as shooting people (or hunting) is to a road trip.

Appeals to nature are labored. What's the most natural thing to do with a knife then? A plastic bag? It breaks down pretty fast. In the end, a gun propels a lead slug at high speed and good accuracy over a distance of scores of yards.

Not really. Most automobile racing involves driving your car as quickly as possible along a clearly-marked track. The skill set to do that is pretty much exactly the same skill set required to run over people.

it's more like the skillset for being a getaway driver.

running over people doesn't require that much speed, but lots of agility. if you're driving really fast,a person will get out of the way, and you won't be able to turn fast enough to intercept them.

Clearly you never watched Death Race 2000 - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072856/

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