Safe Speed Forums

It can be pretty hard to overtake at night on a quiet road if the guy you're following doesn't use his mainbeams. He's just using dips (and around here we'd call him a 'dippy'). Because he's not using his mainbeams we can't see far enough to actually overtake. We can't use our mainbeams because we'd dazzle the dippy in his mirrors.

But I found a near perfect solution to overtaking a dippy (within the last year or so) and I thought I'd share it with you.

The trick is to set yourself up for the overtake and get into a fully offside position - perhaps a bit further to the right than normal. You're now in the dippy's offside rear three quarter blindspot still travelling at the same speed as the dippy. Guess what? You can put your mainbeams on now and evaluate your overtake before you commit to overtaking. The dippy doesn't get dazzled in his mirrors because you're in his blind spot. If it's clear you can go. Sorted.

And another one bites the dust. (Should have been called 'the overtaking song'.)

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Paul Smith
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Yup - I tend to put my mains on very slightly earlier than that, copping the dippy very slightly. Doing that usually slows the dippy down very slightly as he becomes alerted to your intention before your tail lights appear in front of him

I would put the beams up as part of the overtaking manoever, but not as part of the earlier go/no go decision.

We have two possible scenarios really, stuck behind dippy on a road that you know very well, and secondly on a road that you do not know.

On a road you know, you are more likely to overtake because you remember the layout and know the safe speeds, you do not need your lights to see where you might be going. Because it is night you can clearly see other vehicles lights at a distance (especially oncoming vehicles), but what about vehicles from a side road? They might want to go towards you, and seeing lights from that direction, determine that Dippy is not going that fast and that they can get across if front of him, and therfore pull out into space that you are accellerating into. I would want to anticipate this, and by going full-beam it hides the tell-tale traces of their lights going across the road. If they are comeng out from the left and crossing your carriageway they might not even see you because by going into dippy's blind spot you are hiding from them.

On a road you don't know, then you have to rely on what you can see, to establish the safety of overtaking, which in this case is the white lines, and again you have to depend on the light spill from oncoming or side road vehicles to tell you what might be an oncoming hazard. I will admit that the road ahead would have to be obvious (i.e. light up) or dippy would have to being going particulary slowly, and I would have to be in a serious hurry before I overtook on a road that I didn't know.

In all of these situations I wouldn't be relying on infromation from my main beams to make the Go decision, and I would rather get the extra information that the main beams would hide. However, once the decision is made and I am committed (level with Dippy's back wheels) I would put up the full beams to both illuminate the road, making it very obvious to Dippy what I am doing.

And this caution is from a driver of a 265 bhp Subaru Impreza with a sub 5 second 0 - 60, who will probably only be on the wrong side of the road for 3 seconds!