mb240
Active Member
I took a spin recently to Oxford. I must say that the roads by and large were fantastic, compared to our rural roads in Ireland.
The route:
The 400km journey was surprisingly brisk, taking around 3.5hrs in total, and was either dual carriageway or motorway for the whole thing. I don't recall being stopped in traffic on any of the M56 -> M6 -> M6 Toll -> M42 at all.
However, the M42 was a bit of a joke - the surface seems incredibly uneven for some reason, and is quite different to say, the Midland Expressway "M6 Toll" which was empty and fantastically smooth.
But, I could not help but notice that your fellow countrymen seem to like to drive at around 100mph in the fast lane. Is this just the part of the UK, or is it typical? I got the impression before that people were all scared of cameras and cops, but apparently not!
God how lucky you all are!
For anyone interested, I found the AMG doing around 10km/l for most of the trip and I am by no means light footed. Overall it used around 40 litres of fuel, which I was very pleased with (around 2/3 of a tank). The motorway driving was simply miles more economical than rural driving which happens once you get 100km out of Dublin when the motorways stop. In terms of performance, the car seems so rock solid at speed that it's a little disconcerting - there seems to be lots of power available even at relatively high speeds. I think for the low price I paid for it, even though it's 7 years old, it really did make a long journey seem absolutely effortless; in retrospect I suppose these cars are made for doing long distances at high speed so there you go!
Anyway, a sort of pointless post, but it was my first "longish" distance drive so I had to do a little report. I am thinking that, I could perhaps make Folkestone from Holyhead in around 5-6 hrs on a single tank - too ambitious?
The route:
The 400km journey was surprisingly brisk, taking around 3.5hrs in total, and was either dual carriageway or motorway for the whole thing. I don't recall being stopped in traffic on any of the M56 -> M6 -> M6 Toll -> M42 at all.
However, the M42 was a bit of a joke - the surface seems incredibly uneven for some reason, and is quite different to say, the Midland Expressway "M6 Toll" which was empty and fantastically smooth.
But, I could not help but notice that your fellow countrymen seem to like to drive at around 100mph in the fast lane. Is this just the part of the UK, or is it typical? I got the impression before that people were all scared of cameras and cops, but apparently not!
God how lucky you all are!
For anyone interested, I found the AMG doing around 10km/l for most of the trip and I am by no means light footed. Overall it used around 40 litres of fuel, which I was very pleased with (around 2/3 of a tank). The motorway driving was simply miles more economical than rural driving which happens once you get 100km out of Dublin when the motorways stop. In terms of performance, the car seems so rock solid at speed that it's a little disconcerting - there seems to be lots of power available even at relatively high speeds. I think for the low price I paid for it, even though it's 7 years old, it really did make a long journey seem absolutely effortless; in retrospect I suppose these cars are made for doing long distances at high speed so there you go!
Anyway, a sort of pointless post, but it was my first "longish" distance drive so I had to do a little report. I am thinking that, I could perhaps make Folkestone from Holyhead in around 5-6 hrs on a single tank - too ambitious?
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. Thats strange though, on the three occasions that I've visited and driven in Southern Ireland I thought the opposite and that the roads were great, typical roadster territory 
