The problem with speeding, of course, is that it’s not just about speed, any more than automobiles are just about mobility. A motor vehicle is about emotion as well as motion, sport as much as transport, and empowerment way beyond mere power.  
When it comes to getting your personal motor running, cars rule.  
The driver’s seat is our first real taste of the raw stuff, the heady whiff of command and control. And it’s ours from the moment that the old man gives us the okay to “get the car out” or “warm the engine” or some similar pretext. We’ve just been given the key to the door of the family wagon, to the ignition, and to life.
We lurch the beast down the driveway and out onto the tarmac, as we launch ourselves into the world. It’s a buzz, a rush, an entirely new variety of kick in the pants.
A couple of days later, that buzz gets an added boost when we lurch down the driveway after the old man has said nothing of the kind. And wasn’t even home when he didn’t say it.   
From that initial thrill ride, cars quickly became something else again. About freedom from public transport, and better yet, from parents. The freedom to go wherever, whenever and whyever. The freedom to be free.
Once you own a car – well, that kicks in life’s turbocharger. Now you’ve got independence and privacy, as well as a room with a changing view. And it’s yours, somewhere to keep your stuff that’s not in your parents’ home, somewhere to take girls that your brother isn’t. He can’t snicker outside a door that’s zipping down the highway.
Now, we’re the front seat supremo. We call the shots, select speed and determine direction and destination. We decide who’s going, and who’s going nowhere. We are masters of the metal, of the music, of the drive-up menu. Hell, we’re masters of the universe.
For me, that door to liberty came in the unlikely form of a Morris Minor, an utterly inoffensive ladybug of a car that might have had three horsepower under the bonnet. The Minor was the Pride and Joy of the mother of my friend Jim. We, of course, were minors too, but much lower on the P and J scale.
Jim and Mike’s outings, unauthorized every one of them, began with some serious sphincter-tightening as we coasted that little four-seater out of his mum’s driveway. We’d engage just the starter motor (ask a mechanic) until we were part way down the street, and then those three horses could be quietly conscripted and our flight gain some speed.
Away and down that hill, Jim at the helm of our getaway vehicle, our grins widened with each passing driveway and then passing streets, and ultimately, swelled into pure elation when the last shackles of suburbia were shed.   
We had escaped. We were free. Better yet, we’d taken charge of our own lives. For the first time, there was a gut-deep sense that we had control. It wasn’t about speed, but mobility. Direction mattered little, just as long as we were leaving that place of our childhood confinement.  
For a couple of small-town boys, the vehicle’s power was not that of cubic centimetres, but the fact that it got us out of there.
The Morris, it can be admitted now, came close to taking out a couple of guideposts on the never-ending S-bend that was our coastal highway. This is what happens when teenagers get into an arm-wrestling competition with 1940s British automotive technology.
Cars have changed, but youth hasn’t. It’s still a squirming package of bad hair and worse skin fueled by testosterone (and estrogen), stimulated by risk-taking and exuberance, nagged by inexperience, bored with boredom and driven to be impulsive.  And this is the time of their lives – at this cresting peak of their biological, chemical and physical tides – that we put them behind the wheel and give them their first real taste of power.   
As Jim’s mum thought when she put the Morris away at night: What could possibly go wrong?