fall in motorway speeds, or my imagination?

[carmonk]

Yesterday I notice a load of fast drivers on the M6 (90+), more than usual. Don't know why that was, but I did remark on it. The fastest was a white BMW that passed me at around 115mph - as it buzzed into the distance I saw it had 'Police Training' written on the back.

[streaky]

This morning I felt that speeds generally on the M3, M25 and M23 were lower than I have experienced in recent years, including in the 50mph roadworks section under TOD scameras.

And a problem this is bringing is that the MLMs are now cruising in the outside lane at ~63mph (indicated ~65), inhibiting others from making more rapid progress.

Notwithstanding, I saw three personal-plated, high-end saloons stopped by marked (2) and unmarked (grey Audi) police cars.

Streaky

[Sam.F]

A74(M) outside lane seemed to be running at it's usual ~95mph today. The rest of traffic in the other 2 lanes was pretty much all sub-80mph though which is definitely a bit slower than normal.

[Lucas Ayde]

Seems to me that the biggest factor to getting better mpg is to not constantly accelerate/brake and is not necessarily down to your speed (within reason). There have been plenty of occasions where I got maybe 35mpg on a 70 mile journey over mixed roads at a 'brisk' pace because traffic was very light, whereas the same journey at a much lower average speed returned maybe 31mpg when there was more traffic and hence more speeding up and slowing down.

These days, if traffic is too heavy to make quick progress I'll happily set the computer display to mpg and play the 'max your economy' game. It can be quite interesting to try to keep up the mpg in challenging conditions. Today for example I was stuck behind a couple of cars on a country road for a fair distance. The guy in front of me was constantly braking as the person in front of him was one of the 40mph brigade. Annoyingly he passed up many clear chances to overtake (meaning it wasn't really possible for me to take them both at once safely) but would keep hanging on the bugger's tailgate, hence the constant braking from him. What was he thinking?

I just hung back a good distance and tried to maintain momentum (no braking) to max that mpg reading. Strangely satisfying and much better than getting frustrated at two examples of moron driving.