by Mushroom

Created on: January 10, 2009

A Close Shave. As an experiment I put a Ford 1300cc G.T engine into an Ford Escort van, and one evening I decided to put my foot down on the accelerator to find out what top speed the engine could muster. The arm of the speedometer was close to 70 m.p.h but the harsh vibration was making the experiment noisy and slightly dangerous and so I took my foot off the accelerator. However as the van came to a slight curve in the road its back wheels started to slide sideways, but before I could correct the steering the van had slide further along the road and was now in a broadside. The slide happened so quickly that it took me a few seconds to realise what had taken place. I didn't panic but I had never been in this precarious situation before so I tried to figure out how I could manoeuvre the van back on course. Because I wasn't wearing a seat belt at the back of my mind there was the thought of the ditch and large oak trees that grew at the side of the road. And so I started to slowly turn the steering wheel of the van, and miraculously its rear wheels slide back to their correct position on the road. Before I lost control of the van once again I was very relieved, so then I began to think about my close shave story that I was going to tell my friends. But the van was again sliding out of control until it slide back into another broadside, and so I started to slowly turn the steering wheel, but time was running out fast because I knew I was nearing a main road. It was thirty metres from the main-road that I saw something approaching, but it came too soon because the next thing I knew I was up side down in my van. It took me a few seconds to realise what had happened, but everything was OK because I wasn't injured in fact I hadn't been hurt at all. When I clambered out of my van I then saw what had taken place, the van had hit a brick wall and that is what saved it from crashing through the side wall of a wooden barn. The large curved brick wall which took the brunt of the impact was about forty feet long. Thereafter there was a 500 insurance claim for the wall. The next day I discovered that there had been two accidents along that road that night,and they were both caused by garbage lorries using a nearby council landfill site. It was from there that the lorries had disposed of the mud from their tyres onto the wet surface of the road. Along that same road a few years previously a man was killed when his car careered off the road, the car hit an oak tree and had some how catapulted itself upon the branches of the tree.

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