Jim Kenzie's The Driver's Seat

Licence plate, thy name is vanity

I've long thought that if only we were required to have our full names and photos plastered all over our cars, we'd all drive more politely.

It's the anonymity, the lack of face-to-face connection with other drivers we have in our cars, that allows us to get away with the crap we get away with every day.

Which makes me wonder why so many people with vanity plates seem to drive like idiots.

The whole point of a vanity plate is to make you stand out in the crowd, draw attention to yourself, let people know who you are, or at least know some defining characteristic about you.

So, 'HAUS 6', driving a brand-new black BMW Z4 up on Goodwood Road north-east of the city this past Friday afternoon, what was that all about?

Passing me (among others) in the on-coming left-turn lane? Diving onto shoulders and merge lanes to pass other cars? Tailgating gravel trucks? Playing silly-bugger drag racer away from stoplights?

Oh, Mr. Big Shot, using your 300 horsepower to beat a poor little 115-horse Volkswagen City Golf across an intersection so you could cut him off and gain one whole car length.

Do you drive like this all the time, or was this something special?

This nonsense went on for maybe seven to eight kilometres, in fairly dense summer Friday afternoon cottage-bound traffic. Because you weren't looking far enough ahead, you kept getting caught behind trucks and other slower traffic, so it wasn't at all difficult keeping up with you.

And when I turned left onto Yonge Street (you were going straight on westbound) I was right beside you.

All that sound and fury - not to mention irritating every other driver on that stretch of road, and causing at least three dangerous situations - signifying nothing.

Your net gain for all that aggressive driving was - absolutely zero.

A clear case of money getting into the wrong hands.

Not to mention having the top up on what was the nicest day of the summer so far.

Now, the licence plate surround on the rear of the car suggested it came from BMW Autohaus, the dealer in that vicinity. Maybe the car was a demo, and the 'HAUS 6' vanity plate belongs to the dealership?

Maybe it was a sales rep behind the wheel? Or a prospective customer?

Whatever; just remember the proverb about people living in glass houses...

"As I said to the Queen last evening...

...I hate to name-drop."

But I did have dinner last night with Paul Tracy and Jimmy Vasser, along with a small sub-set of Canadian and American motorsport journalists, including our own Norris McDonald.

It wasn't a complete coincidence that I sat beside a chair which had a "reserved" placard in front of it - I have been to a few of these things.

Sure enough, Paul sat right there.

PT as he is known in the series ("The Thrill from West Hill" is a media creation) was frank, forthright and - a bit surprising, given his somewhat steely reputation - quite friendly and outgoing.

He told us dozens of stories about his early days in CART / Champ Car. Among the more fascinating was being summoned to Roger Penske's office mid-way through his inaugural season when he was racing for Dale Coyne's perennially underfunded team.

Paul and his father Tony had a contract thrust at them.

" 'You have five minutes to sign this' Penske told us," said PT.

"My Dad asked, 'Can we have a lawyer look at it?' Roger said, 'No. There are 20 guys out there waiting to sign this. Do it now or we'll find someone else.' "

PT signed.

He said he was being paid a mere fraction of what team leaders Al Unser Jr. and Emerson Fittipaldi were being paid, but they were stars, and he was a rookie.

I had heard before that PT in fact did a lot of the testing and set-up work for all three cars during his first years with Penske. Although he had a reputation as an undisciplined hard-charger during the race, he was also a very good development and set-up driver.

So when he got to the track for the race Friday he had already put in hundreds of testing laps earlier in the week; little wonder he was tired and didn't always fare too well, while his teammates scored wins and championships in cars he had largely set up.

In 1994, the trio finished one-two-three (Little Al, Emmo, PT) and the Tracys felt Paul deserved a raise.

Penske pointed to the contract and said, "That's what you signed...".

Later, when Penske's main sponsor Marlboro wanted to back off a little in response to pressure on tobacco companies to reduce their involvement in all forms of promotion, Penske wanted essentially to farm Tracy out to Tony Bettenhausen's team to keep Marlboro happy, then bring him back when Emmo retired, which was presumed to be not far off.

The Tracys pointed to that same contract, which said it could not be assigned to any other team. "That's what you signed..." they said to Penske.

Paul accepted a standing offer to join the Newman-Haas team for approximately a seventeen-hundred percent increase in salary...

All us dinner table guests expressed surprise that Penske came across as such a hard-nosed guy.

"It's business," said PT. "We get along fine now."

There's a book in Tracy's life, for sure. I have experience working with Indy Car drivers, having once ghost-written a column for Mario Andretti. Paul has my business card.

Vasser added that when it became clear Honda Canada and Michael Andretti's people were going to bring the Indy race back to Toronto, it was inconceivable that Paul would not be a part of it. He had been essentially out of a ride all season.

"We put Paul in a car at Watkin's Glen last weekend, to sort of knock the rust off him, get him back in race shape. OK, he crashed out, but was going well at a track he had never been to before."

Hard to imagine that in all his years of racing, he had never run at The Glen, which is only a few hours from his Guildwood Village Scarborough birthplace.

"We expect him to be in the hunt on Sunday."

I mentioned that Paul was not known for just stroking around building up championship points.

"No," confirmed Vasser. "If he was, he'd have won more than just one! He only knows about winning."

Penske put it another way when the young Tracy was having what seemed to be more than his share of crashes.

"You can calm down a fast guy," said Penske. "You can't make a slow guy fast."

Tracy was always - IS always - fast.

He had some difficulties in today's practice session. They will be making some changes to the car, and with another practice Saturday morning, expect to be in position to fight for a top-five qualification spot Saturday afternoon.

Whatever happens, you know PT is going to make it entertaining.

Idiot driver of the week?

I've often thought 'idiot driver of the week' would make a cool feature. Show pictures of people doing egregiously stupid things on our roads, maybe having them see themselves in the paper or on the Internet, perhaps causing them to mend their ways.

Then I thought - well, if I'm taking the pictures, presumably while I'M driving, I'd be on my own list.

So I'll have to rely on verbal descriptions.

Among this week's candidates: a woman driving a gray previous-generation Dodge Caravan on the eastbound 401 near Mavis Road last Sunday afternoon - text-messaging.

Not merely phoning - text-messaging. On the highway. At maybe a buck-twenty.

How could I tell she was texting and not phoning? Wouldn't making that determination again mean I wasn't paying due attention my own self?

Mea non culpa.

It was my passenger, my lead guitar player Rockin' Robin (we were on our way to a gig!) who counted way too many finger pokes for it to be a telephone number.

Now, I am no good at guessing ages. And doing so for women is a mug's game at any time. But this was no teenager who maybe didn't know any better. We figured maybe late-'20s, early-'30s. Given she was driving a minivan, we would presume she was a Mom, although we did not see any kids in the van with her.

But Mom - don't you think those kids of yours would love it if you were alive for their high-school graduation? At what point does a conscious decision to text-message at highway speeds make any sense whatsoever?

Idiot Number Two this week would have been the driver of a black Acura MDX, southbound on Yonge Street south of Steeles who ran a red light late Monday afternoon.

No; didn't run it - absolutely creamed it.

I can't say for certain whether it was a man or a woman at the wheel; it looked like a guy from what I could see of the back of the vehicle as it rocketed past me, but these days it can be hard to tell.

The MDX was at least six or seven car lengths behind me when the light turned amber. I had plenty of time to stop, without even worrying unduly about the white BMW 3-Series which was marginally tailgating me at the time - he stopped with no apparent ABS activation or tire-screeching too.

But the black Acura just sailed on through, the light clearly having turned red when it was at least two car lengths from the intersection.

Now, these are just incidents I have personally witnessed.

The two young men involved in the street racing crash a couple of days ago on the DVP that left two dead would certainly be on the list.

The investigation into that bizarre situation in Kingston where three teen-aged girls and their aunt were found dead in their car in the Rideau Canal has not yet determined if that was a traffic incident or not. One news outlet has speculated that one of the young women was practising her driving even if she did not yet have a licence.

Perhaps it is not right to speak ill of the dead at a time of family tragedy like this.

But that's the one thing text-messagers and red-light runners obviously do not think about - those left behind if they do cause a fatal crash.

I know from all-too-personal experience that the effects of fatalities like these linger for decades, for generations. In my own family's case, sixty-five years and counting.

Never mind the truck driver who ran over my would-have-been sister (it happened before I was born). It wasn't even his fault, but geez - he killed a five-year old kid. How did that affect the rest of his life, and that of his family?

The headlines last for a day. You can look it up on the Internet for a few weeks afterwards.

But the victims are gone forever.

The worst thing about rotten driving is that most of the time, we get away with it.

The text-messaging minivan driver didn't kill anybody, as far as we saw, and presumably got home safely. (That message couldn't wait five minutes?)

That red-light running Acura owner didn't tee-bone anybody - this time - and presumably got home OK too. (Was the twenty seconds gained really worth the risk? He was only a couple of car lengths ahead of me two stoplights further down the road.)

I just don't understand.

And it isn't even a full moon...

Traffic is like the weather - everybody talks about it; nobody does anything about it.

Except our Mayor and City Council, and everything they do just makes it worse.

Still, was it just me, or was this past week particularly stupid?

As the old joke goes, there are two seasons in Canada - winter, and construction.

(I know; we whine when the roads are awful; we whine when they try to fix them. I just wonder if there's any sort of warranty on road repairs - aren't they always repairing the same stretches of road all the time?)

But this week?

It just seemed more awful than usual.

Yes, it was unusual to have a holiday in the middle of the week, with the US counterpart today, Saturday, meaning yesterday was their add-on day off. Usually, that makes this weekend among the worst of the year for traffic.

But what was going on Wednesday and Thursday?

It took over two hours to do the 45-minute run to Grandma's Thursday (Happy 92nd, Ruth!)

The pixelboard signs on 401 eastbound just south of the airport said two lanes were blocked in the Express past Islington; 680 News said it was a truck blocking the road.

Traffic was already stopped at Highway 10/Hurontario - unusual even at rush hour on a working day and this was 3 o'clock on a holiday-for-most-people afternoon!

I could see that my usual deke up the 427 past the airport to 409 was dead-stopped. So I bailed onto 427 South, east on Burnhamthorpe, onto Dundas, and north on Islington, hoping to avoid the 401 blockage.

Guess I wasn't the only one thinking that way.

So, east on Eglinton, north on Royal York, aiming for St. Phillips and Weston Road.

But there were police cars, ambulances and fire engines ahead, so it was east on Lawrence, left on Scarlett Road, then St. Phillips, Weston and finally, 401.

Several more slow-downs, but we finally got there. Probably would have been faster to just stay on the 401.

Coming home, the night-time construction was underway, so more stop-and go. And I hit one bump so bad it actually shut off the dashboard lights on new son-in-law's City Golf! I Fonzie'd those back on with a little percussive maintenance, and got home after midnight.

Geez.

Then yesterday, again heading in to The Big Smoke, the pixelboard signs again said the Express was very slow, the Collectors moving well. Again, traffic was backed up to Highway 10. I moved right towards the Collectors, and came across a fresh crash. A pick-up truck had been nerfed off onto the right shoulder, and a car was nicely wedged under the front end of a trailer (as in tractor-trailer).

Not sure what happened, whether the transport truck had tried to bail out of the Collectors (some people go the opposite way to the pixelboard sign suggestions on the assumption that everyone else WILL follow along), or maybe the car cut off the transport truck and the pick-up got caught in the crossfire.

This wasn't what was causing the problem mentioned on the pixelboard though. Once past that issue, traffic sped up for a while as it alwasy does once past a constriction, only to slow down again near the airport.

This time the 409 deke worked OK, and it wasn't too bad into the city, although it was pretty slow past Yorkdale.

Turns out I was lucky, because as I was tuning in to 680 News again to see what lay ahead, it said that the 401 was COMPLETELY blocked at the Highway 410 interchange due to a jackknifed tractor-trailer.

I just missed it.

That clearly wasn't the crash I had just passed, so I'm guessing the slow-down caused this new one, as the trucker probably couldn't stop in time.

I am answering several e-mails today from truckers complaining about this morning's Kenzie's Korner segment on Motoring 2009, where I whined about the dangers caused by the newly-allowed (in Ontario) truck trains.

Yes, I know most truck drivers are excellent drivers.

Yes, I know most problems are initiated by crazy car drivers,

But when you weigh 80,000 pounds and are eighty feet long...

I digress (it happens, doesn't it?)

The strangest part of this week's traffic? Coming back home again from north-central Toronto, 401 westbound around 7 p.m. on a Friday of a holiday weekend.

I expected I'd have time to plant some vegetables in the median strip.

Nope.

A minor slow-down at the 403/401/410 combination (the pixelboard sign said one left lane was blocked but it was open by the time I got there).

Otherwise - where the heck was everybody?!?

It boggles the mind.

If the economy is so bad who ARE these people on the roads? They can't all be heading to the Unemployment Office in their brand new BMWs.

Some out-of-town relatives at Grandma's (here for last weekend's wedding) wondered aloud why Torontonians put up with this.

I guess it's part of the price of success. Too many people want to live here, and despite the availability of at least some transportation alternatives, and the manifold traffic-related drawbacks, the mass transit system of choice is still the private automobile.

I'm SO glad I'm a tele-commuter...

Please don't screw this one up!

I'm getting the chance over this holiday Wednesday (sounds weird to say that) to reacquaint myself with the Ford Fiesta, a car I liked a lot during the European preview last year.

Sharp-eyed viewers can see the Ontario dealers' plate on the back - this is a European Fiesta that Ford of Canada has brought in for evaluation purposes, and they loaned it to me for a few days.

Fiesta is not destined for Canadian Ford showrooms until the 2011 model year, but it cannot come too quickly as far as I'm concerned.

It is simply a terrific little car.

Ford has an excellent reputation for vehicle dynamics - in Europe, if not necessarily here.

This reputation was made by cars like this Fiesta.

It rides beautifully - smooth, supple, neither floaty nor harsh.

The steering is light yet ultra-precise, and it handles like a champ.

Even with a small-by-our-standards 1.6 litre four cylinder engine, performance is acceptably brisk, thanks in part to a crisp-shifting five-speed manual gearbox.

How can Ford miss with this little gem?

Well, those of us old enough to remember Ford's previous attempts to bring in their European product are worried. My brother had a 1948 British-built Ford Prefect, fer cryin' out loud. My cousin had an also-British 1955 Consul. When I was a summer student in Noranda Quebec my best bud drove us around in his Mom's cool-if-also-British Zephyr convertible.

Then there was the original Fiesta. It was replaced by the first Escort. The Concrete/Mistake (sorry: Contour/Mystique). The Merkur XR4Ti. The Scorpio. And the current Focus which, once they got around to building it properly, was a pretty good little car until they mushed it up for the most recent version.

All of these were terrific in Europe.

None of them was worth the powder to blow them to hell when they brought them over here.

So I just hope they don't screw up the Fiesta too.

The two most likely sources of screw-up are the suspension (PLEASE don't make it all fat-assed North American mushy on us) and interior trim quality (the whole theme of the European car is that it looks, feels and is equipped like several classes more expensive than it is; I just hope Ford can find American, Canadian and/or Mexican suppliers - our Fiestas will be assembled in Mexico - who can match the level of quality in this test car I have here.)

Not that I wouldn't welcome a few changes. The centre stack on the European car (shown here) is unnecessarily complicated and unintuitive to use. The right-side steering column stalk for wipers is also non-conventional - pulling the lever towards the wheel in most cars activates the windshield washers; in the Fiesta it switches on the rear wiper.

But these are minor issues.

Again Ford, please - DON'T SCREW THIS ONE UP.