Working in pune and spending my weekends at home in mumbai makes me shuttle between these 2 cities twice every week...but hey !!! who the hell is complaining a travel freak that I am and now the boon of an expressway has made commuting on weekends all the more fun
So its pune to mumbai on friday evenings and the other way round on monday mornings...I just want to share with you all the amazing ride that I had on my way home last friday...
Managed to get a lift in a tata indigo GLE totally unaware of the fact that there was a speed demon behind the wheel. Started my journey from a place called chinchwad in pune and entered the expressway at a place called dehu. From chinchwad to dehu we had to take the old mumbai-pune highway and by then our man had already started showing glipmses of what was in store for us. Now this part of the old highway is without any divider and so we were made to witness a couple of close shave overtakes completely oblivious to the oncoming traffic of heavy vehicles that are usually found on this road. ’’ Man this guy must’ve guts’’ I murmured...and to my surprise none of the other passengers in the car complained as I presume by then the thrill of speed had started taking over the fear of death
No sooner did we enter the expressway, our man ( read pilot ) was ready for take off and offf we went.....the needle slowly climbing beyond the 120 kmph mark and resting snugily around 130-135 kmph....saw quite a few qualises and sumos on the horizon soon fade into the background as we ripped thru the couple of tunnels on the way.
Must admit that the guy had pretty good driving skills for when a dog suddenly popped out of some bushes on the divider on to the road, the driver showed enough presence of mind to brake and swerve the vehicle to the left inorder to save the animal from almost certain death. Well, this action surely made us all skip a beat or two and also woke up some who had dozed off to sleep in the rear seat
Before 25 mins were up, we were coolly crusing over lonavla and soon had entered the winding ghat section. The needle had come down from its earlier resting place for sure but not below the 3 digit mark as our man was busy pushing the car into corners making us experience the severe CG forces as we struggled to keep ourselves into our seats Soon the tortuous section of the stretch was over and once again we found ourselves ripping on the concrete leaving scores of cars
behind.. and that included amongst all a black vtec, a landcruiser prado ( seems this guy wasn’t in a hurry) and a couple of city 1.5s.
Suddenly as we were in the middle of all this, there was a big swooosh on the right and a purple PORSCHE CAYENNE shod with huge 295 rubber effortlessly cruised by making a mockery of many drivers which were trying hard to rip their cars. But to my dismay, before I could catch the cayenne in my nokia 7650, it was already a tiny spec on the horizon ( I have my doubts whether the cayenne was undergoing its homologation test for indian driving conditions)
Touchwood that was the only monster which got past us during our speed-ride which got over as we neared vashi....as I looked at my watch, I couldn’t believe that we had reached mumbai in slightly more than an hr...of the numerous trips that I have made in the past couple of months, this was the fastest ever !!!
Its another story that it took us almost equal time in covering the further distance till the airport due to the evening rush hour traffic but yeah, as I got out of the car, I knew that this drive had transformed the impression about the indigo in my mind. Even though this vehicle was more than a year old and had done more than 35, 000 kms on the odo, yet it almost felt like new without any kinda rattles, etc whatsoever.
The ride quality and handling was also quite good and the peak output of 85 bhp was sufficient to propel it in speeds excess of 130 kmph that too with the a/c on throughout the journey. Kudos to tata for taking care of most of the niggling problems faced by the early indica owners and coming out with this indigenous vehicle focussed on the VFM segment. No wonder you see so many indigos on the road these days.
And as for me, well...today happens to be yet another friday and I’m keeping my fingers crossed
cheers
~A