It was a few years ago.
At the time of this story I was driving an old battered VW diesel that I had bought for a pittance. It had an engine that had been badly abused, and had absolutely no power to it at all.*

One Thanksgiving holiday my children and I went to visit my parents as they were in South Carolina. My girlfriend of the time drove her car with my two sons, and my daughter rode with me in the Weedeater.

As we were right around the North Carolina border on I-95, we hit some heavy traffic. We were all going the speed limit, but the cars and trucks were densely packed. The Weedeater being as wimpy as it was, I tried to stay in the slow lane as much as I could, but every now and then passed a large truck that was going slower than most.

I went to pass one such truck and was making some progress when we started up a long shallow incline. I watched the speedometer as our speed dropped, feeling a little ashamed as I went slightly below the speed limit, but the truck was laboring worse than the Weedeater was and was slowly falling behind. I was having a turtle race with a lorry.

As this was happening, a large SUV driven by a man in his fifties was hovering less than ten feet behind me. I could see his florid face in my rear-view, his mustache bristling with rage as he beat on the steering wheel while our speed dropped lower. In truth I would gladly have gone to the slower lane, except for this humungous truck that was right where I would need to go. But I was still a tiny bit faster than the truck anyway, so I just kept going, ignoring the beefy red face twisting in apoplexy behind me.

Finally we crested the hill, after maybe thirty seconds of this, and I began to outrun the lorry again. I got a decent distance past it, then got into the slower lane to let the cars pass me. As I did so the big SUV swerved toward me with its horn blasting as Mr. Beefy Face extended his middle finger at me, road rage ripping through him, then he jammed on the accelerator and roared down the expressway.

Only thing was, directly behind him was a fully marked police car that he had overlooked in his rage. As he roared off down the highway, so did the cop with his lights flashing.

My daughter and I passed them less than a mile later on the side of the road. I resisted the temptation to honk the horn and wave, though perhaps in retrospect I should have.

We were still laughing when we arrived at my parents' place.

(Technical explanation: a teenage driver was involved. The turbo was messed up and one of the hoses was munted in a way that would have required replacing, which was not cheap, and it turned out that a sensor had gone bad so it always assumed it was idling and didn't have sufficient fuel feed to get out of its own way. But it was amazingly efficient, at least.)
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Fri 4 Feb 2011, 3:17, 2 replies)

I twatted the turbo hose on my diesel
drove around for 6 months with terrible acceleration.

Then when I got it fixed I drove like a mental for a week before I adjusted.
( The Light in Chains don't touch the Pope's boner, Fri 4 Feb 2011, 7:55, closed)

I did try to fix it.
The hose had an aluminum bit in the end of it that had apparently been dragged for a while and ground half off. A friend of mine and I rigged it to hold for a bit and see if it improved the acceleration, but it didn't and our rig didn't hold. A new hose was going to be well over $100, so I chose to ignore it as I knew the car wouldn't live much longer anyway.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Fri 4 Feb 2011, 16:36, closed)