Race cars are purpose-built machines, and a completely different breed than your daily driver. Even if your daily driver is a sports car. What many folks don’t realize is that one of the key differences is a race car’s tires. One racing driver forgot this when he decided to take his street legal race car on the highway. The resulting ride was absolutely wild.

Redditor NorthStarZero lives in the Detroit area and races a highly modified 1997 Eagle Talon AWD, which is a rebadged Mitsubishi Eclipse. After a long weekend of racing, he was towing his race car back home across Canada. He was just crossing back into Detroit, through the Detroit/Windsor tunnel, when his daily driver Suburban decided it had had enough. One of, “the brake lines on the ancient Suburban I use as a tow vehicle (and my daily driver!) bursts.”

That left the driver without a good safe option to commute in to work on Monday. But they did have one option. “The race car…is still notionally street legal at this point.” Because it’s highly modified, “It won’t pass any sort of inspection, but it is plated, and the plate stickers are still current, so I can drive it to work.”

The driver really should do one thing first: “All I have to do is swap the street tires on and I’m OK.” See the extremely grippy and soft tries are not great for street use, are very expensive, and wear out quickly. But after the long weekend, the Redditor accidentally slept in.

They thought to themself, “OK, these Hoosier race tires that are on the car are worn out and near cord.. but they can get me to work and back. So off I go to work in Detroit.”

The racing enthusiast made it to work safely, and despite being tired was able to, “fight through a workday.” They were even more tired after the day. “On the way home, I’m on autopilot.”

“Then something happens that is super-rare – there’s no traffic on the I696W to I75S offramp. This is a big, sweeping curve, all concrete, that goes from a high deck to a ground level road: smooth, grippy, and downhill. And I’m on Hoosier A3S03s.”

Bring your race car to work day

Sports car enthusiasts know the pure bliss of finding your favorite highway ramp traffic free. Normally, we’ll drop a gear, and maybe be a bit over the speed limit by the time we exit the ramp. But remember how tired the Redditor is at this point. “I’m on post-workday autopilot, so I am driving by feel…I smoothly accelerate through the turn, clicking through the gears, mind totally elsewhere.”

Remember, they are set up to go fast. “Strapped into a MOMO bucket race seat, 5 point harness, on race tires.” Driving until you “feel” the vehicle begin to lose traction could be dangerous. You can imagine them accelerating up to 70 or even 80 mph on the ramp before merging onto the highway, right? Think again.

“As I dump onto I75 – which is flowing pretty well, not much traffic today – I’m struck by how slow everyone is driving.” That’s when the driver looked down. Their speedometer reads 145 mph. That’s right, they were cruising like it was a slower NASCAR race. Obviously those are “go straight to jail” speeds–and the driver knew it.

“Nail the brakes as hard as I can, stand the car on its nose (race tires and race brake pads!)” Within four car lengths the driver had slowed to 75 mph. And the good news is, they didn’t get pulled over for the absurd high speeds. You can see the entire Reddit post embedded below.

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