Road rage scenario: How I kept calm & avoided physical confrontation

He was provoking me to stop my car so that he can start a fight.

BHPian Strider24 recently shared this with other enthusiasts.

So this happened with me last month in Pune, after a long office day I was going to Westend mall to catch a movie. I started off at 6.30 pm from my home and took the road with least expected traffic toward Aundh via Pashan-Baner link road.

An old Maruti Dezire car was ahead of me driving at snail's pace for some time. What was more flustering that there was plenty of space ahead of it, but oncoming traffic was making it impossible for me to overtake. It seemed that the Dzire driver was talking on phone while driving leisurely.

After a while I lost patience, I honked and flashed my headlights to draw his attention & this is when all the drama started. He, didn't like being disturbed, stopped the car mid-lane and started hurling abuses at me. Taunted me to go ahead and see what happens.

I didn't want to escalate the situation & also there were other cars behind me, so I overtook him and went ahead thinking it's nothing, let's move on, but NO, now he started to honk continuously behind me as if saying 'My Turn'.

What followed after this is captured in the Dashcam Video.

The way this driver chased me without caring for his or anyone else's safety on road was scary. It was sure that he was either a criminal or drunk or both. He was provoking me to stop my car so that he can start a fight or something. However, I was neither in mood or in a shape to do so, at the same time, I was also thinking about news articles in TOI where serious fights broke out during the road rage incidents and People were killed.

In the end I was relieved and happy that I didn't take the bait. Being hot headed doesn't help in such situations. I have read many times in this thread only how to handle such situation & I am glad I came out okay.

Only time when I was disappointed in this episode was with my car. When he was trying to overtake from left and I tried to accelerate to outrun him, my car didn't have enough power in the 3k-5k RPM range, it simply wasn't accelerating enough. It made me think, what's the use of 140 PS and 173 NM if you don't have it in a usable powerband! what if it had happened on a highway where the only option was to outrun him towards a police check-post.

I am seriously thinking about going for stage 1 engine tuning soon to be prepared. All suggestions are welcome if Corolla Altis's 2ZEFR NA engine is suitable for tuning or not, so far I hsven't found any examples of a corolla being tuned in India.

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