drive like a man

Many years ago I owned a Fiat Uno 60S. It was incredibly tinny, a little bit rusty, underpowered, but cheeky and enormous fun to drive. It only needed two major trips to the garage for mending.
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The first was a brake cylinder failure that manifested itself at 70mph approaching a busy roundabout on the A1 with a boot full of old wardrobe. The second - and more expensive of the two - was a blocked carburettor that would cause the engine to die at random intervals and regularly prevented any kind of acceleration. When I took the Uno to the local Fiat dealer for the carb problem to be fixed I was berated by the mechanic who told me that I needed to put my foot down and stop driving so "nicely". He reckoned I had coked up the workings of the carb by being too gentle on the accelerator. My excuse was that there was a little "Economy Meter" on the dashboard where the needle would leap into the RED danger zone if you so much as looked at the throttle pedal - I tended to keep the needle in the yellow or green zones for maximum economy. Chastened and a few hundred quid worse off, I vowed to slam my foot to the floor in a Senna-esqe style.
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Yesterday I took my Fiat Stilo into a local repair shop to have the brakes checked. I was getting concerned as they were becoming ever more vague as time went on. It felt like applying pressure to the brake pedal merely resulted in a polite request to the braking system that if it didn't mind and if it wasn't too much trouble, it would maybe consider perhaps slowing the car down to a halt at some point in the next few minutes. I prefer my brakes to be a bit more positive, with a bit of bite and attitude. My brakes were Ronnie Corbett in Sorry and I wanted them to be a cross between Johnny Rotten, Vyvian from the Young ones and Grant Mitchell. I thought, at best, I needed a new set of pads; at worst, it was a new brake cylinder, discs, pads and shoes.
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When I went to collect the car I was told that I had about 90,000 miles still left on the pads. The ABS was fine, the servo was fine, the fluid level was fine, there were no leaks of any description, the disks had plenty of miles left on them. The problem was that the brake pads had "hardened" through lack of use. "Modern cars," the mechanic explained, "are designed for bombing down the motorway at 80mph and then coming to a dead halt. You used to be taught to go down through the gears when you brake, now you're just meant to brake and then change down. With asbestos being banned from brake pads nowadays, they tend to get hard if they're not used enough."
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It turns out that, yes, once again I am driving too "nicely". Where once I had my eye on the Uno's Economy Gauge, now I am mindful of my wife and children by braking smoothly and gently through courtesy. I should have been bombing the Uno around in 3rd gear and arriving at roundabouts in my Stilo in a screaming cloud of acrid tyre smoke and brake dust.
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Last night I took the family to the chip shop and, mindful of the mechanic's advice, braked harshly at every opportunity. The car was dipping and bucking like a demented rodeo bull as I braked ever later at junctions and corners. It was great fun for me, but not so much fun for my passengers, who all complained of whiplash.