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Comment by Xylakant | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry to spoil the fun here, but if you want to drive a race, rent a race track and don't do it on public streets where you endanger innocents.

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You're not spoiling the fun at all, only sensibly trying to ensure that everyone else can have theirs without a sleep deprived moron canonballing into them at 100 mph. Its all fun and games until you kill someone.

Considering how many deaths there have been at Le Mans (closest comparable organised race I can think of), this is certainly irresponsible. I wonder if they went through a jurisdiction where the minute by minute trace from the tracking company would be enough to prove they broke the law.

3 deaths in the last 30 years. It's a race that tops out at 250mph whereas these guys only got to around 100mph less. That's quite a lot less. I get your point, but I'm not sure these are really comparable.

They don't compare at all. There's a couple of reasons that races on dedicated tracks are significantly safer than road races, chief among them:

* Everyone on the track is doing a race. No mother with a crying child on the back seat having a momentary lack of attention, getting in your way.

* Everybody is roughly on the same speed scale. No slow lorry around the corner or behind the slope, doing a third or a quarter of your speed.

* No bikes or pedestrians.

* The track is known to be free of obstacles. If an accident occurs or any obstacle ends up on the track, people with huge flags jump out and signal danger.

* The track is surrounded by safety zones designed to stop you moderately gently, especially in danger spots. So if you loose control, there's first green, then stone-beds, then hay and last a hard barrier. This allows even motorcyclists on the track to have a significant chance of survival. It's not the fall that kills you, it's the high speed impact on an immobile object.

So when you race, be responsible to you and others. Stay on the track.

Yeah. Hopefully these assholes can be criminally charged; their identities are known, after all.

Yeah! Hopefully! Because despite the speeds they were going, there were absolutely no casualties, accidents or incidents. Let's charge these bastards anyway. That'll stop them not killing anyone in the future.

It could discourage the next team from attempting it, and make "going public" less appealing. "If you break the record and go public, you'll be arrested"

So it's fine to behave this way because they didn't kill anyone?

That's the Non Aggression Principle at work, or at least a pretty common and equally stupid interpretation thereof:

They clearly did not initiate violence against anyone, therefore, any intervention limiting their freedom to recklessly drive at insane speeds for nearly 29 hours with basically no sleep would be immoral.

"And here I stand accused of a crime I didn't even commit! I mean 'Attempted murder'... Do they give nobel prizes for attempted Chemistry?!" - Sideshow Bob

You might want to reflect on the concept of legality. I know, thinking hurts sometimes, but it's totally worth it!

You ever see the first episode of Homicide: Life on the Streets (great show, and largely based on actual incidents, at least for the first two seasons) where a guy confesses he accidentally shot some guy, but it's OK because he meant to kill someone else? I think you and he want to live in the same country.

Agreed. I wonder how this article jeopardises him in terms of getting arrested for this. It's basically a public confession isn't it?

The guy who did it in the M5 (Or that might have been someone doing the gumball rally record) had to research statute of limitations for all sorts of driving offenses he might be charged with in each state before he went public.

It looks like he averaged 85 miles an hour [1] - above the speed limit pretty much anywhere in the US. That's pretty indicting, but I bet he can't get a ticket since no individual agency knows that he sped in their jurisdiction. I'd personally love to see some effort made to peg him with at least a speeding ticket by looking through, say, toll road logs.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+from+LA+to+NYC...

I agree with you but in this case it wasn't about racing. It was about breaking a specific record.

[EDIT] To all the people who are downvoting; I am pointing out that I agree that it was a stupid thing to do but just saying "go on a race track" is pointless because he wanted to do something that cannot be done on a race-track. It is like telling someone to go to a climbing gym instead when they really want to conquer Everest.

I wonder how much it would cost to get enough roads closed/with police cars as a rolling roadblock to make a proper race legal? I expect the city start and end would be tricky.

That's no excuse. If breaking the record involved endangering others, leave it. Break another record if you have to. Do a higher jump than Baumgartner or swim across the atlantic, I don't mind - just don't race a car on public roads and use "I made it as safe as possible" as a pathetic excuse.

I am not offering it as an excuse and like I said I agree with you.

However your suggestion will not help because he was not after the experience of a race track, he was after the experience of breaking the record of the canonball run.

It is a time-trial, a race against the clock.

From an aesthetic point of view I really like the cannonball. From a practical point of view I suppose doing it does make you a bit asocial.

> From an aesthetic point of view I really like the cannonball.

I can relate. It's the kind of stuff that movies are made of. But one important property of being a responsible adult is that we're able to distinguish between fact and fiction and keep everything that's fiction safely on that side. So let's keep cannonball and all those other races on public roads where they belong: in the movies. If you really think a race across the states on public streets is great I guess you can get those roads blocked by the police - which would be totally fine with me. I really enjoy watching the Tourist Trophy.

I have driven across the country a few times. There's not much traffic once you are beyond the suburbs around the major cities. Even in densely populated areas it's common for highway traffic to cruise at 75+. 100+ in a high-performance car is not too extreme.

As a Brit I find this quite hilarious. On our motorways the speed limit is 70mph, but pretty much everyone cruises along at 90mph+.

Depends on the motorway. And while there are plenty of people going at 90+ that's not most people. I'd guess most people are doing about 80.

Unless there's a police car visible, when everyone drops to 68 and there's a huge tailback.

Or they're on the M25.

As a German, it's even more hilarious. I do 100mph on the Autobahn most of the time and still get passed by Audis, BMWs, Porsches, Mercedes driving 125mph. I never understood why you can drive only 70mph in the States in perfect conditions with looong roads, extremely long view distance, nothing in the way. Makes no sense to me.

There's quite a bit of discussion about the driving cultures of the US vs. Germany. In particular, Germans appear to think that you should pay attention when driving. The US attitude to driving is best exemplified by the fact that most family cars now have 2-3 cup holders per seat and two or more video screens.

Not all of the roads, out west, for example, are as well engineered as the Autobahn.

But you do have a good point--this doesn't account for all of the difference.

There isn't THE Autobahn anyways. Autobahn is just our word for Interstate and not all of them are equally well-maintained. There are speed limits where it makes sense. There are speed limits in certain conditions (rain, ice, windy bridge, worn-down road), there are flexible speed limits (rush hour).

Recently, I drove from NYC all the way down to Miami. Speed limits make sense on the Blue Ridge Parkway, because of all the wildlife. But we were also passing endless roads that went just straight, perfect view, perfectly wide. This would be a typical spot in Germany where there's simply no speed limit, because it doesn't make any sense.

I noticed something else in the States: People on Interstates and highways stick relatively close to speed limits. However, once you get into city limits of bigger cities, everyone seems to drive at least 10mph over limit, if not more. In Miami, there was a point where not a single car(!) was driving the maximum allowed speed, but at least 10mph faster. But I noticed a similar thing in other major cities as well.

I never understood that.

Agreed.

In Chicago, 10 over would be slow. On the tollway that skirts Chicago, the limit is 55, but 80 is not uncommon.

I think the speedup is kind of a natural thing. When commuting, everyone on the road knows the road and conditions very well and are all in a hurry to get to the office or home. And from a practical standpoint, this speed tends to maximize the overall flow of traffic. And the thinking is that you stand out on the road in the rural area, but in the city, you are one of zillions.

In addition to the points raised in sibling replies, the standards for getting a driving license in the USA are very low.

The German Autobahns (Motorways) are something else beyond that. No legal speed limits there. Going along at 150 kmph (~90mph) and being over taken by cars going way faster than you is something else.

I would say 90+ is the target speed of a lot of cars, however the actual average is probably still in the 70s due to congestion. I'm trying to gather some data on this at the moment.

To say "pretty much everyone" is false.

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