My world has slowed to a crawl.

I had planned to write this piece about terrible summer road traffic - then an interesting thing happed the other day on my way to a wheeling trip in Washington. I am still going to write the article about the same topic - just with a new twist.

As you can imagine I travel a ton in the summer. During late August and early September I think I was home a mere four days between flights and drives. When I am on the road driving I tend to push the speed limit to that 10-over range everywhere I go.

This summer, while cruising the highways the slow speed of travelers was frustrating me. I know I go a bit fast, but heck, they were all but crawling up the highways. To those going really slow, I flash my headlights to get them out of the fast lane so I can carry on. Then I was traveling on this trip a few weeks back. Again it seemed like I was the fastest guy on the road and worked my way in between and around travel trailers and truckers alike.

Now before I go much further you will have noticed last issue that I lifted my Chevy Duramax. I love the look of the truck but was quite shocked at the drop in fuel economy. This I presumed was due to the larger tire, added wind flowing under the truck and the change in gearing. Well, there was another reason...

On that trip to Vancouver then on to Seattle, I was heading downhill on the Coquihalla Highway when I got the red and blues flashing in my rear view. I looked down and saw I was doing 120 in a 110 zone at 11:30 at night. Now this isn't anything unusual on this highway and was surprised I was getting hauled to the side of the road. The nice Hope, B.C. female police officer comes to my window and said I was going a bit fast. I said 120 wasn't that bad and I was ready to take my lumps. She said no, I was actually doing 135! I guess my surprise was genuine enough as she walked back to her car. I thought I had re-programmed my tire size through the Edge power programmer, but apparently while doing some adjustments it blew that tire size out and thought I was running around on 245's rather than 35s! That made for a 15 km/h difference - wow! So up to the window she comes, says she will be nice and gives me the lowest speeding fine - $130.

So I cruise at what seems like a snail's pace until I can pull off the road, measure the outside of my tires and re-set the tire size. It seems I was blasting through all of those trucks and tourists at nearly 90 miles per hour all summer. They were not the slow pokes at all - I was the jerk in the big truck speeding everywhere I went. After I got the tires properly dialed in, it felt like I was crawling. However, my mileage went up almost right away, the corners didn't seem so sharp, and the angry looks from other drivers stopped!

So to all of those drivers out there that got passed by a big, lifted Chevy and got flashed with my headlights...sorry. To the nice officer that actually believed the I-didn't-know-I-was-going-that-fast line from a guy in a big lifted truck, thanks for not giving me the excessive speeding fine. I will take my lumps and now I know the outside of my 35-inch BFG A/Ts are 2660 mm. Oh, and the lift actually hasn't hurt my mileage at all.

Albert Vandervelde
Editor, 4WD Magazine