Just had another one today making it about 12 so far in my life. Today’s was especially brown trouser though because it could have taken other people with me.
Let me set the scene, very wet roads, I have a heavy right foot and I decided to take the car that does not do wet.
Sensibly I leave the gearbox in old man mode and gently potle off to work letting the engine warm up nicely. Get to the motorway slip road and get stuck behind a coffin dodger doing 30, so after merging I may have floored it. All was fine for the first second, then I changed gear. It was at this point I realised the gearbox was in the most aggressive setting not the old man mode. How did I know this? I was three lanes across looking at the back of the car through the side window. Completely sideways flying towards the central barrier at 80.
Lifted off corrected the steering and shit myself all within a millisecond.
Then a small lake appeared. At this point I was just about straight, touched the edge of the puddle and ended up three lanes across the other way. By now I was doing a mere 60. Thankfully this time I could get it straight immediately. So of course I styled it out and just carried on driving to work, putting the gearbox back in old man mode. Looked in my mirror, everyone had slowed and had hazards on. So within probably a second or two I had gone three lanes right then three lanes left before getting real control back.
Not proud, if the road was busy I would have hit people, if I didn’t have wet tyres on I would have been in the barrier and gone. Hands were a little shaky after.
I have nearly drowned while whitewater canoeing. I am trained and experienced and a instructor. It was caused by a piece of equipment failing. I actually started to breath water. It was an interesting sensation. I did black out but was rescued just in the nick of time. 20 seconds more and I would have been dead.
The closest I appeared to come was ending up with hyperkalemia. A couple of nurses were told to drop what they were doing to hit me up with a two part protocol (something to do with insulin?) to counter it.
The registrar waking me every hour through the night to ask if I had any chest pains made me suspect that things were looking a bit iffy. It was also bloody annoying.
My blood glucose once fell so low that the left side of my brain ceased to work. You miss it (I couldn’t speak, couldn’t write, couldn’t use my master side). If things had been much worse I’d have lost consciousness and then who knows … I was ‘locked in’ for several hours during which the medics looked at stuff (EEG, CT imaging) but couldn’t usefully intervene. Neither I nor they knew if I’d ever recover. Then, slowly, I did. It’s the single most frightening thing that’s happened to me so far.
Car related one: me flying up the m1 in the 80’s in my MG metro, flooring it as i need to be at work for 9am and I’m travelling back to yourkshire from my parents in bedfordshire. Come round a sweeping corner with the accelerator pinned (probably about 85mph) to see stationary traffic about 200 meters ahead of me. Immediately slam on the anchors and proceed to drift across 3 lanes of traffic on to the hard shoulder where i majestically stop about 4 cars in to the back of the jam. The bloke in the car next to me looks at me and claps. I sit on the hard shoulder for 10 minutes re-evaluating my attitude towards driving fast while I stop shaking.
My closest was on my YZF750 bike back in the early 90’s. I was never happy with the handling and constantly fiddling. (really, it was the under sprung front end that was the issue, but…) One day I decided to do something radical and put a few spacers under the rear shock mount to raise the rear and sharpen the geometry to try and get the thing to turn better.
Decided to go for a very quick test ride and being young and stupid didn’t put any bike gear on, just went out in my shorts and t-shirt.
All was going well and bike was handling really well. This is great, I was thinking, and proceeded to get carried away (see young and stupid). Coming down a stretch of road I knew very well, I was going through a descending left hander faster than I’d ever done it before (at seriously illegal speed) and thinking how sharp the bike felt. I knew there was a junction a few hundred yards further on, so rolled off and slowed down to only very illegal speed. Passed the entrance and rolled on hard. Unfortunately the road here is a bit rippled and as the front went light under the hard acceleration and the thing started to wobble. Just a bit at first, and I’m thinking well, it’s just a wobble, the bike does this. But this one didn’t just die down as they always had done in the past. Very quickly it developed into a full blown tankslapper, the first proper one I’ve ever had. At this point, time has slowed right down and I’m able to take it all in and process as things go from bad to worse to very worse. Quickly it gets so violent the bike is actually bouncing from side to side like a space hopper and the handlebars are smashing from lock to lock. I’m clinging on and thinking fuck, fuck,I’m actually going to crash here and it’s going to be strawberry jam time. I remember those few seconds (probably 3 or 4 in actuality) with remarkable clarity to this day. Then, just as I was thinking that’s it and I’m preparing myself mentally for pain or worse, it just stopped. I’m just riding along as if nothing happened. It takes a few more seconds to sink in that I’m still here and I slow down and pull over. I sat down by the side of the road and just sat there shaking for 10 minutes and reflecting on how close I came. My friend who was following got a prime view and he said it was properly spectacular how out of control the bike was. He was also convinced that I was off.
When I got home, put the suspension back to standard and never tried anything like that again.
What’s all this re-evaluating sitting down for 10 minutes?
You guys clearly haven’t had enough near death experiences.
In my slightly more reckless days (yes I used to be worse) a friends dad used to own a car dealership. In the summer holidays we would get the trade ins that failed mot. We would then strip them out, get rid of the glass etc and race them around his fields. In one of my brighter moments I was sat in the bonnet holding on as my mate raced around the field. The car was an old fiesta and the radiator leaking bad and hanging off, we had already rolled it a few times so it was a bit squashed too. But it was all laughs and fun as I drank my beer on top the bonnet laughing at how amazing we all were. It was at this point that my mate decided to do a handbrake turn.
Like a shot put being released I flew off head first from the car. That few seconds of air time gave me enough time to look at my landing point and see a sharp brick sticking out of the ground. Like a guided missile this was my head’s landing point.
That few seconds in the air felt like an hour easily. Don’t remember much more after hitting the rock. When I regained consciousness I threw up, got on my mates quad bike and went back to the house to get more beer. Had a great party that night, felt pretty rough for a while though. We mounted the brick in his barn as some sort of trophy
Pretty much like this, except I didn’t come off because it stopped about a millisecond before it spat me off.
There was another bike incident involving a bend, a hump-backed bridge, too much speed and lack of concentration.
Do not jump a jump backed bridge on a sports bike while still leant over. Going sideways in the air at ~50mph leaves you considering your life choices.
Somehow I didn’t crash that time, too, though I was expecting to! The bike landed, somehow straightened itself out and carried on.
Back in the eighties I was sitting in a queue of crawling traffic during a very windy storm. A large tree blew over and crushed the car in front killing the driver
(well, this one doesn’t)
