One time, two buddies and I were in a Mazda b2200 pickup. I was stuck in the middle because I was the smallest. I don't know how we had room but we also had a case of bigmouths. We were enjoying our evening flying around the back roads of southern Minnesota. At that age, we generally drove each vehicle to its full potential. Being a diesel truck, the b2200 didn't have much power. But when you got the RPM's up, it would drift just fine! After a few months of pleasure in this truck, there wasn't a straight body panel left on it. On this particular night, we had a bungee cord strung across our bellies holding the doors shut. Every corner the outside door would swing open and you'd hold on with your beer free hand not to fall out! About the time most of the case was rolling around on the floor empty, we crossed a heavy crowned crossroad at about 60 mph. After the suspension bottomed out I proclaimed "What a piece of $#(@!" My buddy driving says " no its not" and drove into a nice wide mowed ditch. At 60 mph. When our headlights straightened out, we saw the indrive. If we didn't discover later that we had lost our spare out of the box, we wouldn't have known how far we flew and how lucky we were. Even the shower of glass and Mickey's wasn't enough to convince my pal to let off the gas. We had landed back on the road and he played it off as intentional! When we went back to retrieve the spare. We decided to measure the distance we flew. 67 feet. And we saw the 4 foot diameter stump buried in the weeds of the indrive. Our tire tracks were literally 1 inch from the stump. The body of the truck stuck out 3 inches from the tires. I still wonder about that.
