OnStarrrgh

Back in March 2006, a friend took me auto-cross racing. There's a drag racing strip south of town, and the car park for spectators is turned into a quarter mile set of sharp corners and narrow chicanes with some judiciously placed orange cones. Over the course of six hours, there are four groups of racers. If you race in one group, you have to carry out a marshaling/support job in one of the other groups - in this way, they can have a full set of people watching for run-over cones and violations of racing protocol.

In each group there are about 30 cars, and each car starts off every 30 seconds around the course which takes about 40 seconds to travel around, and when you finish, you can go to the back of the line-up grid for three more runs in your group. In this way, almost 500 timed races are carried out with great efficiency.

Unfortunately, it means about 6 hours waiting for at most 8 races around the track - sitting in my friend's tricked out Subaru, though, it was excellent fun and I could clearly see the draw for those with the passion for it.

In the last group though, one car looked distinctly out of place. Amongst the street race cars and turbos, there was a large tank of a town car. It was coloured pale brown, and would not look out of place in a retirement community with some blue haired old woman peering over the wheel. The car ponderously pulled up to the starting gate, and did its best to screech off around the course. The crowd watched as this slow tank of a car pitched over like a drunken soccer mom around the curves and attempted to burn rubber on the sharper of the corners. Halfway around, however, the car slowed down suddenly, and completed the course at almost half the speed it started with. The crowd murmured amongst themselves - what had happened?

The answer came soon enough - the auto-cross drivers had rented the car from a local agency to take it auto-crossing, and halfway around the track, the OnStar emergency service intercom crackled to life, with a service person enquiring if they had been in an accident, and were they alright?

Apparently their driving was extreme enough to set off the acceleration sensors dotted around the frame of the car.

Memo to self: do not buy rental cars.