Thank Christ I heard him before I saw him. Had I not, his fully lowered, fully sick 2002 VX Holden Commodore would've slammed apace into the side of my car.
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I'd likely have survived, albeit with spinal and internal injuries but Commodore Boy would've definitely died or ended up on a respirator in Wollongong Hospital after surgeons removed the mangled P-plate - originally mounted on his front bumper bar - from his stupid, pimply face.
Hoons. What is it with car hoons?
My aforementioned brush with this species occurred just last Friday night at the roundabout near our local McDonald's (the preferred nourishment of the Eastern Pimpled Hoon BTW). Noticing his headlights approaching from an apparently safe distance to my left, I prepared to enter the roundabout knowing I had right-of-way.
As I proceeded into the intersection, I heard the unmistakeable PWRAAAAAAARP!!!! emanating from the hoon's 3-inch modified, chrome-plated exhaust pipe as he advanced at at least 90km/h in order to beat me to the imaginary chicane in the great speedway race that only he knew we were having.
So in the interests of avoiding what WIN News would've dubbed "a South Coast horror smash" I slowed to let the Acne Racing Team fly through the roundabout - and even get two wheels off the ground as he did so! And I got to go home to my family! Bravo, mud brains.
Normally, if I'm out for a stroll or driving sedately through the suburbs with the windows down, few things scrape against my senses more than the high-octane shriek of hoon-modified exhaust systems - particularly given that the asinine aim of such tinkering is to make a 1.6-litre Toyota Corolla hatchback sound sorta Formula One-ish, but really not like that at all.
In this case however, the senseless scream of the Commodore's non-muffler saved its hoon from going the way of so many others: to hoon hell ... where they all belong.
Look, I'm a pretty easy going, tolerant dude but I simply cannot stand hoons and I have personally never understood their rev-head, stuff-everyone-else mentality.
I partly put it down to the fact I didn't bother learning to drive until I was 23, instead preferring to hitchhike (pre-Ivan Milat of course) and bludge lifts off my mates.
That's not to say there was a shortage of native Eastern Pimpled Hoons in the suburb where I grew up. Back then we tended to scorn the species as wannabes and wankers. Yet some guys still did, and they kicked holes in their rusty mufflers (a forerunner to the 3-inch chrome-plated exhaust pipe) so they sounded, I dunno, loud and like a broken tractor farting nails.
There's two kids from my neighbourhood who never, ever lived down the Sunday afternoon in 1984 they spent screeching around our dormitory suburb in a P-plate emblazoned Datsun 1600 wearing crash helmets. Crash helmets FFS!
The passenger was holding the Gregory's Street Directory and calling out directions the way a Scandinavian rally car navigator might. My mates and I still laugh hard about it.
I imagine it was ever thus with hoons. It's not hard to imagine the general public's disdain for the teenage drivers of horse-drawn buggies with sawn-off suspension and Jet Pilot etchings on the rear windows of their carriages as they slung their vehicles heavily into the corners of ye-olde Princes Highway, kicking up clouds of dirt and horse manure, and leaving cries of "Arggh! Why must thee hooneth?" in their wake.
In fact I'll bet the wheel had barely been invented before the facially blemished cave-teen Grunk managed to roll a giant stone disc at speed down a hill and wipe out a family of Neanderthals as they quietly ate their lunch by a river.
Yet despite their obvious stupidity, hard-wired self destructive tendencies and the fact they account for the tiniest fraction of the motoring population, homo-hoonectus has managed to survive (though not evolve terribly much) through millennia.
I truly sympathise with modern governments whose job it is to address the continued existence of this introduced but now endemic pest. We've wiped out so many species since white settlement - many by folly and accident - but we don't seem capable of eradicating young male dickhead drivers.
There have been valiant and periodically effective attempts at advertising these fools out of existence, with decades’ worth of commercials depicting the horrific emotional wreckage that's left by the road accidents they cause.
Other PR drives haven't been so great, though. Remember the TV ad from a few years back that encouraged women to hold up their pinkie fingers at passing hoons, as if to deliver judgement on the meagreness of their penile credentials?
Well a copper mate of mine reckoned this coincided with an increase of reports of young hoon passengers flashing their schlongs at women from the windows of speeding cars as if to say "The ad's bullshit, ladies!"
But it seems whatever governments do - from shock advertising campaigns to education programs to stricter licensing conditions and impounding the very chariots the hoons ride in - these halfwit cousins of humanity don't (or perhaps can't) get the message.
Incredibly, fatal crashes involving young people rose dramatically across Australia last year. No less than 233 died. Many more were seriously injured.
As a society, you'd think we'd have this problem sorted out by 2016. But traditional methods don't appear to be having a lasting impact. After much thought - and while paying attention to my own speed as I noodle about the place - I have a suggestion.
Let's prohibit the sale of cars that can go faster than the speed limit.
I drive an old twin-cab ute which has a speedo that tops out at 180km/h.
The speedometer on my mum's late model hatchback says it can travel at 230km/h! Imagine how much faster it'd go if she smashed a hole in the muffler.
By continually spruiking the zero to 100 capability of cars and building them to travel twice as fast as the maximum speed limits we're giving hoons dangerous numbers to aim for. If indeed they can count.