Let’s face it. Most of us here are enthusiasts. Most of us here have driven enthusiastically at least once if not on a regular basis. And when one does that, one can sometimes… do things that make one look foolish.
This is a confessional thread. A place to air that dirty linen. It is not a thread for competing on how epic a KANSEI DORIFTO you did in your fake street racer car while putting two wheels in the gutter while racing a tuned R34. This is for catharsis, for the fuck ups, for when you made a complete pillock out of yourself and people knew and you knew people knew and it felt bad. It can be anything from near-misses, looking dumb, to outright “oh shit, well, I binned that, time to write it off.” The only condition is that it has to be your fuck-up.
Also, it should go without saying, don’t share so much that somebody investigating any insurance claims can trace you down and go hey I heard you said this and make your life difficult.
An example then:
Car: Honda Civic 9th Gen Hatch (Peapod) The Dickbaggery: Peapod may have a slushbox with the most anaemic VTEC engine Honda ever produced, but it’s still dynamically ok. So I like to pull J turns in it. This one time I was parked on a grassy plain with some campers around, admiring all the blue-green algae blossoming all over the Murray Darling. I thought it’d be funny if I showed my brother a J-turn while leaving, so I put the car in reverse and floored it. Then I swung the car around.
What I forgot was that the ESC was still on and Peapod certainly did not anticipate this level of intentional dickbaggery, so it did the only sensible thing it could think to do: it shut down.
I was thus left with a stalled car that refused to move until I had reflected upon my actions being stared at by a bunch of campers with my brother laughing at my shame.
Car : E36 Touring street class dedicated drift car The dickbaggery : So, you might know that I’m dailying what amounts to a track car, more so after I’ve removed most of the stuff that was put in it to make it streetable (all of the interior, all of the music including subwoofer) in an attempt to make it chug less, be faster and NOT SCRAPE ALL THE TIME. So, yeah, imagine yourself in a drift car when it rained. Naturally you’d try it out a few times, then another few. Eventually I got comfortable with it, so I thought. After about 30-40 minutes of hooning (in broad daylight) I managed to overestimate the corner, it turned out to be much narrower on the exit than I thought it’d be, so I went rear wheel into the kerb. HARD. Results - tire destroyed (rare size), wheel bent (rare wheels), allignment way off (only 2 people do allignment to drift spec like that in my city), and the worst thing about it - it’s not my car. Drift on the track, guys. Seriously. Cost me 160 eur to get the thing back to working order and the rear wheel now needs weights to be ballanced, even after repair.
This has all the requisite elements to be a classic car dickbaggery, the only thing it lacks is that it’s featured in a “DRIFT CAR FAIL” YouTube compilation hats off to you.
Best part is - the messenger conversation afterwards (the next day actually mid repairs)
I started off with “Hey, so the wheel is now straight, and the allignment guy takes me in at 17.00”. The reply was “THE FUCK DID YOU DO”
I was heading home on my bike and was turning into my driveway / yard, it had been raining earlier so the ground (and my rear tyre) was muddy and wet (My driveway is not paved), the sun was out now though so a lot of neighbours and people were outside. Now I usually leave a door to my garage open so I can just turn in and drive directly in without having to stop and open the big and heavy door. The big problem is that you can’t see if it’s open until you are just at the door when you turn in.
So as I was driving in I thought it was open but someone had closed it, so I had to do an emergency brake and my rear tyre slipped (I was doing 35 MPH or so) and I fell right on my ass with the bike over me, safe to say it was pretty embarrassing.
@Deponte Was this the motorbike equivalent of trying to do “skids” in the dirt on a pedal bike like we all did when we were kids?
My turn!
Car: Seat Arosa, 1.0S (50 hp yooooo) The dickbaggery: On a single lane road, speed limit is 60, guy in front insists on doing 40. I am not happy. No chance to overtake, so I sit on his tail, probably at a distance that most people would call tail gating.
Road opens up to a dual carriageway, and I think “finally, I’ll be able to overtake this guy”. Being the enthusiastic twat I am, I floor the Arousa and go into the outside lane. Sadly however, the slow guy also decides to speed up and we end up having the world’s shittest “it’s neck and neck!” drag race.
Arousa couldn’t pull as much as my ego and pride wanted it to so I had to slow down and pull in behind him. I got what I deserved I think.
Bike: Yamaha DT The dickbaggery: Driving down a road (full throttle, but nothing’s happening) and my friend with a faster bike starts overtaking me from the left. I want him to think that I’m cutting him off so he won’t overtake me so I start swerving back and forth (he’s exactly by my side at this point). I almost crash into his side, so he slows down and I thought I “won” so I start to correct the movement but there’s an another bike on my right a bit too close and I almost crash into it. All this time I have the throttle fully open and my bike begins to pick up some speed. Then I look forward: there’s a big-ass lorry. I slam on the brakes and now when there are these two bikes behind me, they almost crash into me and they have to brake too. After that, I can hear my friend hysterically laughing after we had averted 4 fucking crashes in under 10 seconds. The other guy said: “I’m never going to drive with you guys again.”
The whole situation was my fault. I’ve never tried to cut anyone off after that.
Well I fishtailed the bike thanks to the hard braking and the rear went to the right and since I was about to turn left I fell off the bike and it fell on me since I still held onto it. It was pretty fun actually, besides how muddy my jacket and jeans got.
Car: Lancia Dedra 1.8ie MY1994 this very one here V The dickbaggery: With a couple of friends of mine, late night I’ve driven my Lancia uphill of the Mount Saint Micheal, very close to my home town. After we reached the WWI musem, we turned the car back, pop on some Initial D eurobeat and I’ve started to run happily downhill on a road I TOTALLY DIDN’T KNOW. (how moronic)
Before the first haripin, the friend of mine who sat in the passenger seat shouted jokingly to me “Oh, Brake!”
I’ve slammed down on the pedal and the ABS start to vibrate the pedal. I’ve slowd the car just right to make the turn without having ANY damage… If it wasn’t for him… I don’t know…
With this near miss I’ve understood everything. NEVER MORE!
The Dickbaggery: For some reason, I thought it was best to go fast down some tight roads near a very popular bar with many drunks walking around. luckily I hit nobody, but I missed my turn, and ended up going 35mph into some sand. I thought it was my corner then so I turned hard, then I realized my error. car struggled to turn, and I was sailing straight into a telephone pole. luckily the ABS saved me despite the sand, plus the fact I was on a slight incline. what didn’t help was there were a bunch of people sitting on their patio on the house of the corner it happened on… they were all staring at me with a pile of dust around the car as I shamefully backed out. I took it easy the rest of that night
I can see mine are very tame by comparison, but here goes:
Car: 2002 Ford Ranger
The Dickbaggery I: Cruising home from college for the weekend. I cross back into my home state, cruise control is set to 80. I notice a Ford Explorer behind me with a bulky looking luggage rack… Then I see it isn’t a luggage rack but one of those new (at the time) LED light bars! Thankfully I had the sense to turn off the cruise control and coast down to 70. I know he was waiting to see brake lights and I would’ve been screwed. Not as extreme but definitely a fright for me.
The Dickbaggery II: I often enjoy winter driving, especially because a Ranger makes one hell of a donut machine in an icy parking lot. That part went on without incident, though I took amusement at seeing a Mustang with some teenagers entering the parking lot as I left no doubt to do what they just saw me do. On the way home I decided to give it a little gas turning on to the next street, ass end swings out, and I slide around the bend just in time to see a cop car coming up from the next side street. He had no reaction so I assume he didn’t see me since I’m sure the nature of the slide looked deliberate enough not to be explained by “losing control”
Again, I see these are rather tame by comparison and mostly they are close calls than actual incidents, not that I’m complaining.
Car 1977 Ford Granada 200ci inline 6, 4 speed manual overdrive.
So I live in the southwest United States so it usually snows about once per year and is gone by noon. Well this day in the late 90’s it snowed about 6 inches and was cold enough for the ground to freeze. Work got called off for the weather, so I went out to play on some of the back roads. So going from a 2 lane gravel road to a little more than one-ish lane dirt road I really started getting crazy, because I thought I had the feel down for the car on the snow. Yeah I started fish tailing but was having too much fun to back out and eventually spun. The front end of the car went right and straight into a dirt embankment. several clumps of dirt made it all the way to the windshield. It continued spinning with the back end hitting the same embankment a little further down, and continued, eventually stopping with the front end pointed at the same embankment that I had hit twice. Now I’m thinking headlights, grill, tail lights, but it turned out that once I removed the dirt the only thing damaged was the license plate.
The dickbaggery: Within the first few weeks of ownership, probably around October-November time (so the roads were wet and probably borderline icy), I was coming out of my college’s motorcycle car park which happens to have a very sharp turn. I was pulling out, and I guess I applied a bit too much throttle (4 furious horsepower), causing the back end to slip out and ultimately leaving me on my ass in the middle of the car park, where there were like 5 other people stood next to their bikes (one even rode straight past me, fucking wounding). Needless to say, I became a lot more cautious after that and haven’t had something like that happen since, and hopefully I never will!
The Car: 1981 Mercedes 280E W123 4 speed manual 185hp
The Dickbaggery: while driving on the autobahn in the rain, I switched over from the 1 to the 31, there was already a track where someone spun off the autobahn. I thought what a loser! then the old lady threw its ass around following the same track… luckily its high ground clearance meant that i could drive off road for a while and back on to the autobahn.
The dickbaggery: Sadly, I have many to list. I’ll go with the dumbest one first. Early morning and I was late to work. As I’m getting towards the factory, there’s a twisty road with a couple of roundabouts. Idiot me felt it would be alright to do the roundabout at 90 kph, instead of the usual 70. Turn in right, turn left, and then massive understeer. I hit the exit kerb with my front right wheel. I went the final 500 m of the journey and parked. When I came back, the car was on the ground, tyre burst. As idiotic as that was, it wasn’t enough to teach me how to drive more carefully, I needed another shunt to teach me… to be continued
I never had any fuck ups resulted from aggressive driving (although nearly all of my friends have expressed that I drive far too exuberantly, speeding and dashing into gaps in traffic). Most of the damage to the car occur when I try to park, of which I also don’t do anymore. I did power-oversteer my W124 once, making a u-turn while was raining, in front of about 3-4 people waiting at a bus stop. They weren’t car crowds and all probably think of me as an unintelligent man even if nothing bad came to that.
But looking like a berk for getting lost? Oooh yes. Many times.
I once drove in circle in the city for an hour and a half with 2 of my friends, we never got to the intended destination. But that was only the second time I drove into the massive maze that is our metro area.
The THIRD time however, ended up with me taking the wrong turn, leading me to a road that took me outside the city with no u-turn point for 10km. It took 2 hours to do 20km needed to get back to the destination. It’s safe to say 14 people that were waiting only for me to turn up were not pleased in any way.
I didn’t like using GPS then but since have started using them. I still get lost occasionally although never as badly.
hats off to you.
