Just yesterday! Three times! In half an hour! Firstly, I’ll try to describe this in terms that fit both left and right-hand drive countries (I’ve come unstuck before on these boards)…
The man I will describe below has made me turn pale and pump the imaginary brake many times but I have never actually cried out in fear until yesterday - three times in twenty minutes:
I have a mate named Iraj. He’s twenty years my senior, and is an Iranian Kurd who fled the Ayatollah. He was a medical doctor in his home country. Very intelligent and interesting bloke. He also has the attribute of being utterly mad (well, I’ll say eccentric). His driving is quite… erm… interesting.
Frankly he scares the fuck outta me. He has two signature moves that freak me out. The lesser one is this:
Many roads in Sydney are two lanes each way, with kerbside parking permitted in the slow lane during the off-peak, and a “clearway” declared during peak hours. This has the effect that, in the off peak, everybody (fast or slow) drives in the fast lane, effectively making it a single lane road. Now, where there are traffic lights, parking in the slow lane is prohibited for a couple of dozen yards either side of the intersection, so it is a generally accepted convention by motorists that the normal situation is reversed here and you can use these brief few yards of the slow lane as the fast lane. With me? Now, because the window of opportunity is so short, you only do this if you are driving a powerful car aggresively, and are intending to pass some slow truck or something when the light flips green. But not Iraj. He pulls into this kerbside lane as a matter of course at EVERY. SINGLE. INTERSECTION. In his clapped out 1984 1.6 litre Honda Civic. When the vehicle that had been in front of him and is now next to him is a V8. Naturally, we have no chance when the light goes green, and we are stuck trying to merge back into the traffic. With a madman driving. At each of the thirty-eight lights along our journey.
This puts me in an edgy mood to experience Iraj’s truly dangerous move. We will be in the slow lane fifty yards behind another car going slower than us. We are gaining on it. Forty yards ahead of us in the fast lane is a car going faster than the car in front of us but slower than Iraj is driving. Iraj accelerates. We start flying towards the arse-end of the car in our lane. But the fast lane guy is closing the gap. I see this and wait for Iraj to abort (as I would). Next thing, he’s kicked it into third and floored it. We reach the point of no return. As we are about to run up the back of the car ahead, I can still see the other lane guy’s bumper alongside Iraj’s car’s rear wheel. Iraj flicks it across into the other lane. I wait for our rear bumper to clip the car in the other lane, slewing us sideways and probably having us roll. Somehow we make it. There is a blast of horn. “Fucken idiot shouldn’t be on the road!”, says Iraj serenely.
Iraj did this to me twice yesterday. Firstly at 60kmh (38mph), then just in case I wasn’t scared enough, he did it again tighter at 120kmh (75mph). Finally when we had left the freeway and were on the suburban streets (and I thought I was safe), he took at ninety degree suburban corner twice as fast as normal people do. We were going to take the wrong side of the road on the side street. There was almost no traffic around but if somebody was coming, we would be going too fast to be able to get back on the correct side of the road. We’d skid straight. Sure enough, as we rounded the corner, a taxi was right in that spot.
Okay, I’m going to die. You had me thinking this twice in the last half hour Iraj, but this time you’ve done it.
Let’s just say that the taxi driver was a professional, and I am still here to type this post. Another coat of paint on either vehicle and it would have bee na head-on smash. And Iraj kept talking about office politics without missing a beat.
