FailCar rants: Flag-based road safety

It's been too long since @FailCar has had a rant. Well actually, that's not strictly true as he tends to rant quite a bit on twitter. But it's all good stuff, as this piece of inspired thinking highlights.

Eighty-Miles-Per-Hour. That was the hot topic of discussion when the government announced that it was thinking about increasing the motorway speed limit. Now I don’t know where you stand on this and to be honest, I’m not sure I know which side of the fence I’m on either, but one thing I certainly don’t agree with is:

“We will get to places faster, it will be more economical and will help boost Britain’s economy”

What? That’s utter twaddle and I’m sure I don’t need to explain to anyone with a brain reading this that it’s simply not true.

I have quite mixed and varied commutes in different cars and for sure, having a faster car on the most part does not really get you from A-B a whole great deal any faster.

What I propose is that we learn about going faster through the world of motorsport. No, I’m not talking about big horsepower, sticky tyres and ultra lightweight components. All we need to make this country go faster is a stick and a piece of material. AKA - a flag.

Regularly, what causes me issues is slower moving traffic. Often I am faced with looking at something like this:



Seriously I think I could draw the back of a Honda Jazz from recall better than the designer himself. Now, much as I have been known to complain about such ‘dawdlers’, what if there was just someone at the side of the road every so often with a series of flags to hand?

I know what you’re thinking, where am I going to get all these flag wavers? Well I know a bunch of unemployed people with time on their hands and who are great at waving flags:



A quick wave of the blue flag and the Jazz could be informed that “a faster car is behind him trying to overtake”. Happy days - the Jazz has to pull over and crisis and untold rage is avoided.

I was actually stuck behind a BMW X5 last night, (it always scares me that these cumbersome beasts are driven by...well, cumbersome beasts), and every time a car came in the opposing direction they slammed on their brakes to go from 40 down to 15mph. All this in a national speed limit area. It actually got to the point where I flashed my lights, (love those 205 driving lamps), and made them pull over so I could get past. Oh how I prayed for a blue flag.

This morning on my commute I came round a blind bend in thick fog to discover a Fiat 500 that had been parked in the middle of the road, while a middle aged woman was running down the road towards me. Hard on the brakes and I pulled over to find out what was wrong;

“Nothing, I’m fine, just taking a picture of this pothole”

So she had stopped, on a bend, in thick fog to take a picture of a ‘dangerous’ pothole. I can’t quite get my head around that level of stupidity.

However in this case a yellow flag before the bend would have done wonders and avoided a potential accident. Perhaps a red and yellow striped flag could also be utilised for potholes as well as warning of oil or ice.

Another source of mass hatred is the humble-bumbling caravan, which I reckon could come into the same classification as “tow truck or safety car”. Which means the white flag could be utilised in order to warn of impending doom. As a bonus French holiday makers in the UK will be very familiar with the white flag albeit with a different meaning.

Of course when I get off the A-roads and onto the motorways it’s always that same issue. People hogging the middle lane. It’s not Jazz drivers though and in many cases it's chaps in high spec German cars with the cruise control stuck on, a conference call in progress and a Ginsters pasty festering in his crotch.

Black flag. “Report to the pits nearest service station, you have broken the rules and will be disqualified."

Then when you move into the outside lane you have the issue with the 'fastest’ cars of all. Low-spec ‘premium badged’ German cars. They could not afford a decent one and as such are angry and stuck with a cassette deck, no floor mats and sufficiently lower than average genital endowment.

As such they find it appropriate to drive within inches of your rear. Now I do admit to the odd bout of ‘European’ driving to get people out of the way, but if it’s clearly a line of traffic and there is nowhere for the driver to go – what’s the point?

Get caught tailgating? Black and white diagonal halves and you know what happens “if the driver takes no heed of the warning”?

In the event of any accidents you know what would be way more effective than those millions of pounds worth of LED signs that get ignored? Yep, way ahead of me there, a man with a red flag.

We’ve over complicated things, solving problems that aren’t there. In the real world you know what would make you car faster? All the millions of pounds spent on turbos, hybrid systems, the latest ESP, TC, and other random acronyms? No.

A man with a stick and a simple piece of coloured material.

To ensure you're up to speed with your motorsport flags, check out this handy guide.

Photo credit: Matt Hill Photography