Dave the biker
I knew Dave a few years back. He, like many two-wheel enthusiasts, was known for his polite opinions of car drivers, respect for the speed limit and eagerness to conform to any and all road sign instructions.

Just kidding, he was a total speed demon scofflaw rebel. He rode some kind of tuned-up Yamaha and he rode it fast. It was not unusual for him to slice a good third off your perception of how long a journey took and he would proudly boast about the many occasions when he had "out run" the local constabulary. To Dave, other road users were basically street furniture to be navigated like other road features such as curves and junctions.

One night he took off for a high speed burn through country lanes back to town, a couple of hundred kilometres away. The way he tells it, it was a good thing it was so dark because he could see the lights on the other vehicles from much further away than he could have spotted them during the day. At one point, he spied the distinctive diagonal reflectors of a heavy goods lorry up ahead and, rightly, figures the poor sod is limited to 60mph or so. Dave thinks, I'll liven this guy's night up a bit, and absolutely floors it, pushing over an hundredty million just as he reaches the back of the truck...and disappears off the road into a field.

You see the 'back of the truck' had actually been a T junction warning sign and Dave had just hit the kerb at right angles, and at top speed. Unbelievably luckily for him, he was thrown off the bike and straight into a field full of young and bendy sugar cane, cushioning what would otherwise have been a way beyond fatal impact into a merely life-threatening one. An astonished car passing by from the other direction stopped to help - apparently he was a good five minute walk from the road - and he was, in time, fixed and back on his bike. But whenever he mentioned how fast he'd ridden thereafter, some wag was always heard to say, "wow, must've been almost as fast as that time you overtook a road sign."
( pineapplecharm D d M Y, H:i, Sat 6 Jul 2013, 14:07, Reply)