In Lexington...? All the time... With my 1997 GMC Jimmy... Not kidding...
Honestly, I don't know what it is around here; people just drive like that all the time. They're seemingly in no hurry until they think you're about to get ahead of them, then they'll drive 100 mph just to keep you from beating them to the next intersection. Then as soon as they're satisfied that they're impeding your progress, they slow back down to 10 mph under the speed limit. Go figure...
In fact, just a few days ago, I had some jag-off in a POS rice-burner occupying the right-hand lane actually
speed up in an attempt to prevent me from merging onto I-64E. When I put the spurs into the ol' Jimmy and moved into the lane from the on-ramp anyway, he grudgingly (well, I'll admit, I didn't give him a lot of choice -- he was practically on my rear bumper) slid over into the
empty middle lane on the interstate. The rhetorical question that immediately popped into my head: "Well, if there was space for you to move into the middle lane when I 'nudged' you into it, why didn't you just do that in the first place -- instead of speeding up -- when you saw me coming down the on-ramp with my turn signal on...?"
Within a minute, I was cruising at 70-75 mph and he'd fallen back behind me so far that I could barely see him in my rearview mirror -- which told me he wasn't in any particular hurry; he was just deliberately trying to prevent me from merging onto the highway in
front of him.
Puts me in mind of a similar encounter I had in Georgetown, TX a few years ago while driving my C5 convertible. I was on Texas SR-29 eastbound, just coming up to the interchange for I-35. Sitting at a light, I was fumbling for something in the passenger compartment, and heard a very loud engine rev from behind me. I glanced up in my rearview mirror only to see headlights and a grill -- all attached to one of those ridiculously-lifted, diesel-powered pickups. He revved his engine again in challenge. Somewhat annoyed, I merely accelerated normally (perhaps a bit spiritedly from his perspective) away from the light to the next intersection (it's a state law in Texas that every traffic light has to work against the previous light so traffic is impeded
), which was at the overpass at I-35. Mr. Pick-up was on my back bumper the entire way. Waiting again at the light, he once again began revving his engine. "This idiot really
does want to race," I thought to myself.
The next plan for me was to turn left onto the access road on the other side of the overpass and merge onto I-35N. Now, my mamma didn't raise a fool; I know that some of these heavily-modified, diesel-powered pick-ups can put out some
serious horsepower and torque. But they just can't engineer out physics in those things; their center-of-gravity is about 5-6 feet in the air... And my C5 has the Z51 suspension package... So I said to myself: "Hmm. I think I
will give him a race -- and I'll ensure victory by exploiting the most obvious flaw in his vehicle..."
The light turned green, I gunned it all the way into the turn lane (~100 feet straight ahead from the light), and Mr. Pick-up bit hook, line, and sinker: he came charging after me without even seeing what was coming next...
I didn't even touch the brakes as I easily threw my C5 around the 90-degree turn from the overpass to the access road. Mr. Pick-up tried to follow. As I was accelerating my way along the access road toward the on-ramp for I-35N, I glanced in my rearview mirror and saw him desperately trying to negotiate that turn without either wrapping his monster truck around the light post or tipping it onto its side...
All too easy...
Sweet M6, by the way! I've toyed with getting one of the "M" cars, either an E46 M3, an E39 M5, or the E63 M6, but can't seem to settle on one or the other. Plus I don't have the garage space at the moment... But it's still fun to dream!