Need for Speed?

Leave it to the Pros

You're spending an exciting afternoon with your friends, watching your favorite NHRA Top Fuel and Funny Car drivers race down the drag strip. They make driving at high speeds look so effortless that you might be tempted to try your hand at street racing on your way home.

Bad idea - it's illegal and dangerous. The driving conditions you face on a daily basis are completely different from those confronting NHRA professional drivers.

They're highly skilled professionals who compete in a controlled environment. They are surrounded by safety equipment, such as helmets, reinforced roll cages, multipoint harnesses and head and neck restraints. The NHRA Safety Safari and other trained personnel stand by to provide aid at a moment's notice should something go wrong.

On the highway, it's just the opposite: Drivers of varying skills, often unaware of other drivers around them and frequently behaving in an unsafe manner, maneuver for a piece of the road. There's little or no communication among motorists, nor are there emergency personnel who can provide aid instantly when there's a problem.

Speeding Makes Crashes Worse

The numbers tell us high speeds are dangerous:

* Speeding is a factor in one-third of the nation's fatal crashesfatalities in 2011.

* The faster you drive, the less time you have to react to a potentially dangerous situation, and the distance you need to come to a complete stop gets longer.

* Speeding triples the chances that you'll be involved in a crash. It increases the severity of a crash. If you crash at 60 mph instead of 40 mph (a 50 percent increase), the crash energy increases by 125 percent.

Speeding Affects Every Driver

A newer car doesn't make you safer:

New tests recently run by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, in which cars were crashed into a barrier at the leftside of the front bumper, showed that modern engineering and safety measures don't always protect you in a collision. (To see video of the crash tests, go to youtube.com/user/iihs.)

A 2012 federal study called Motivations for Speeding concluded that other reasons for speeding include not paying close attention to driving, being late for work, feeling pressured from other drivers to speed up, or getting enjoyment from fast driving.

* Speeding actually saves very little time. On a 30-mile trip, if you average 55 mph, you'll get there in just under 33 minutes. At 75 mph, you'll arrive in 24 minutes-only 9 minutes faster.

To reduce the tragic consequences of speeding we must improve our personal attitudes and behaviors. Posted speed limits, law enforcement officers, and the court system can do only so much. Ultimately, it's up to us to create a safer driving environment.