Posted on 12/02/2013 8:23:46 PM PST by grundle
Paul Walker liked his cars fast fast fast -- in fact, he once boasted about hitting a top speed of 185 MPH -- and it wasn't on a racetrack ... it was on a freeway.
"The Fast & The Furious" star -- who died in a fiery car crash on Saturday -- made the revelation on GTChannel back in 2011 ... while taking a Nissan GT-R out for a test spin in Japan.
"The fastest I've ever gone is 184 to 186," Walker says on the video .... and then he reveals how fast he was clocked on an actual racetrack.
As TMZ reported ... law enforcement believes speed was a factor in the crash of the Porsche Carrera GT that killed Walker and his friend Roger Rodas in Santa Clarita, CA ... although it was Rodas -- not Walker -- who was driving at the time of the collision.
(Excerpt) Read more at tmz.com ...
>> They found head and shoulders in the glove box.
That’s humerus.
'Stang GT does great in a straight line.
Z does great in twisty roads.
She ate sammiches for lunch.
/johnny
Note also the sign for a 15 mph curve ahead, and if you back out of street view you can see the corner. I would suppose the driver was seduced by the sweeping curve and was showing off his acceleration, then got surprised by what amounts to a dead end. Probably was not going hyper-fast, maybe only 60 or 70 mph, but braked too hard and spun out.
In ‘77, you were the only one out there.
“As TMZ reported ... law enforcement believes speed was a factor in the crash of the Porsche Carrera GT that killed Walker and his friend Roger Rodas in Santa Clarita, CA ... although it was Rodas — not Walker — who was driving at the time of the collision.”
So they report that Walker was not driving but still trash him over the fact that he had driven fast in the past(sorry), oh and oh my God it was on a freeway! Does TMZ translate into really crappy and trashy reporting in some bizarre language?
Back in the days when speed and transport times were considered a valid medical intervention, I drove a Cadillac ambulance conversion that would easily exceed 120. So smooth and quiet at top speed it felt like 65 in a station wagon.
When I was in high school, many years ago, I hit 120 in an old dodge in SoCal on an empty desert highway. It was fine until we hit the railroad tracks at over 80 mph. That was a seat-sucking episode for sure.
Almost as bad as when my friend hit the emergancy brake in my VW Thing when we we taking a sweeping right turn at 50. Never shook as bad in my life as when we came back down on all four wheels. A Thing was not the car to roll over.
God, fools and children...
What Z car? American sports cars aren’t known for twisty road performance, in general and for good reason. You want twisty road performance, think Porsche, not Detroit. America makes some great cars. Some icons of auto history... But America doesn’t make supercars. That’s the turf of the Italians and the Germans. With the possible exception of the Shelby Cobra.
Hit a hill and went airborne for a couple of seconds.
I will NOT be doing that again.
The car was completely unmanageable. Hopped all over.
It was actually manufactured in 1969, and has the 160MPH speedometer.
It's one of a few.
I have provance.
/johnny
Yeah, the Corvette and the Viper get raced. The Corvette has done well in recent years in Trans Am racing.
Have done close to 210km/h which I think is about 160 mph on a bike - when I went to slow down it got into a bit of a tank slapper - quick twist of the throttle and then slowly release back to a sane speed. Seriously if you hit a rabbit at that speed it would be game over. That quickly settled my need for speed!
Mel
The new corvettes are sweet rides... I’d take one in a heartbeat. But they’re just catching up. A ten year old Ferrari or Lambo or Porsche will still eat it’s lunch on a curvy course.
There’s no need to be apologetic about it. America is a country of wide open spaces and long stretches of highway between states. We’re all about strait line speed. That’s our cultural DNA. It’s what we do and we do it pretty damn well. :-)
Hmmm. By the Google map scale ( and using a ruler, folks ) I get 580 ft to the sharp corner, so if he was doing 100 ft/sec ( about 70 mph ) he would have required a deceleration of 8.6 ft/sec2 for about 11 seconds to come to a stop at the corner, which seems an easy requirement.
Maybe he was going a lot faster, or maybe the 15mph corner had nothing to do with the crash, and he just spun out coming out of the sweeping curve. Note the crash site is on the inside of the curve, just past the start of the straightaway, so he didn’t just skid out of the turn.
My friend got decapitated doing that in a jeep sans roll bar. At least he had no kids like this guy did.
Anyway, hats off gents, to a man who died today in a respectable manner
Babe Heffron of the Screaming Eagles, 506 PIR, the Band of Brothers
120MPH in an ‘89 Ford Taurus. It was like an airplane wing and wanted to come off the ground, so I couldn’t push to the peg.
Fastest I’ve ever been in was riding in a ‘02 Mustang at 150MPH on some flat bottom 2-lane between Warsaw and Quincy, IL, with a buddy who’s done over 200MPH on a motorcycle more than once.
My post 75 was meant to respond to 67
My fastest was 120 MPH in a Buick Grand National and I was plenty scared even though I was driving.
It makes one wonder how many last words are, essentially, "Hey, watch this!"
I think Paul Walker would’ve liked this thread.
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