I was headed to work early one morning along an interstate highway, “Whalin’ down the freeway at just the cruisin’ power,” as Delaware rocker George Thorogood would have it. The local troopers usually run with their radars on continuously, and I’d never seen any of them shooting laser, so running briskly didn’t bother me.
I was driving west in the right lane, with the rising sun at my back, when I heard V1’s laser siren.
Now, in over ten years of driving with V1, I have almost never met an actual laser signal in the Northeast. The laser detector is usually triggered by sun reflecting off of chrome, LED fog lights, or auto-toll illumination lights.
I scanned the road and noticed a good deal of sun glinting off of the oncoming cars across the median, and was about to conclude it was a falsie when, in the shadow of an overpass just next to the opposite lanes, way across the wide median, I saw a trooper. “Damn,” I thought, as I saw him just begin to move forward.
I signaled, squeezed the brakes, and pulled to an easy stop underneath the same overpass as he meandered across the median and pulled behind me. He asked if I knew why he was pulling me over and if I knew how fast I was going. Without being too specific, I told him (never incriminate yourself). He looked at my license and registration, advised me to drive slower, and let me go.
The moral? If they get you with laser, they got you. There was no escape on that one. But having V1 allowed me to know I’d been got before Johnny Law could even look at his readout, and to be stopped and waiting before he could even get his chasing adrenalin into second gear, thus showing him that I had at least reasonable situational awareness. It worked.
You can’t get out of all of them, but if you show you’re awake, you’ve at least got a shot, and V1 definitely helped that day.
Eric Lonergan
Ulster Park, NY