This isn’t exactly a kill or a loss, but it was the first time my heart was truly pounding out of my chest after a run… and okay, maybe it was a loss.
I was at the very beginning of a trip down to the Carlisle “tuner bash” with a fellow nyspeeder back in the spring of 04. We were rolling in my new WRX in the fast lane down X90 in Rochester when we came upon what looked like a stock red Eclipse in the slow lane. There are many Eclipse in my neck of the woods that are all-show and no-go RS models with big body kits and blah, blah… As we were passing him we noticed a GSX badge and heard some serious spooling action… very loud, jet-engine sounding spooling action. He saw us coming and was ready to run.
There was enough traffic on the road, and the difference in our speed was pretty significant as I was going by, so I didn’t this was going to equate to much of a run… just a fly-by. Wrong.
I was already rolling at about 60-65 mph as I was passing him. I dropped down to forth, and got on it. Sure I got ahead by a few lengths pretty quick simply due to inertia, but the Eclipse wasn’t going to let me take a quick fly-by win. As I approached 90-95 mph I was still ahead, but loosing ground quickly. At that point I was thinking maybe he’d just let off since we were approaching “tow your car away if you get pulled over” zone. Again… wrong. He continued on the gas until he was on my ass running at about 115-125 into traffic.
He never did get ahead of me, but only because of traffic. We ended up getting off the same exit as us and we shared a thumbs up as we went in different directions. It was a fun run that had the hands shaking a bit. Later on in the same trip I got may ass kicked by a beat-to-hell 240 with an SR20DET swap… it was a bad trip to Carlisle.