It’s getting warmer out. Time to roll down the windows, visit your favorite soft serve stand and put the pedal down.

Or so it seems.

It’s easy to speed on sunny, dry days when you’re racing home from work, cruising for fun or tooling around taking care of stuff around town. Even if you’re not preoccupied with the iPod, your looks or that Filet-O-Fish, it takes a little extra effort to drive the speed limit when the weather starts to warm up.

But you gotta take care and pay attention. By doing so, you might avoid getting a ticket or ending up the subject of the “Tales from the Road: A Traffic Cop’s Stories” blog.

This might go without saying, but don’t try and drive through a flooded section of road if the water is up to the bottom edge of your driver’s door. Why not? Consider these points:

• Water can be pushed up into your grille as you drive making it possible for water to get sucked past your air filter and into your engine. Water in your engine can mean total engine failure, not just stalling out.
• If you stall out in deep water, water can also creep up into your engine through the exhaust system.
• Any water that’s up to your door is likely to enter the cabin and soak your carpet. Wet carpets lead to rusting floors and potentially stinky smells that even the little pine tree hanging from your mirror can’t quell.

A New Bedford area towing company is prepared to hook you up for free on New Year’s Eve if you decide you can’t drive home. As the Standard-Times reports, this amazingly generous service, called “Safe Rides Home,” is being provided by South Coast Towing in the New Bedford and Fall River areas. And get this - they’ll tow your car to your home - for free.

Sounds like a great effort to try to keep people from driving drunk. Any chance any towing companies in the Boston area will follow South Coast Towing’s lead? Fat chance, you say? Yeah, that’s probably true but who knows…

Over the past couple of months, Boston drivers have noticed the new lane design on the westbound side of Storrow Drive where it meets the on-ramp from Boylston Street. The section of Storrow Drive that passes under the Boylston Street ramp used to be divided into two travel lanes and has now succumbed to the great maker of traffic jams known as the lane-drop.

For the sake of getting out of town via Boylston Street, hopefully the new lane design has eased the backup that can occur on the ramp while trying to make your way onto Storrow Drive.

While waiting in traffic, I recently started to wonder if I should start taking the Mass Pike out of town in order to avoid the stop and go routine now present on Storrow Drive. Would I actually save money through less braking and clutching in my standard transmission vehicle by taking the Pike and paying a daily toll? The time that I travel these roads home is before peak traffic volume so taking I-90 west to the Newton/Watertown exit is usually met with little delay.

Would the decreased wear and tear on my car offset the cost of the toll over a year? My gut tells me no. Have you changed your commute since the lanes were redesigned on Storrow Drive?

Sometimes a rainy summer weekend gives way to a perfect combination of drag racing on an October afternoon. When the Cam Snappers Club show was rescheduled for October 25, it also coincided with the Street Fighter motorcycle races at New England Dragway which made for a wide variety of vehicles running the quarter mile on a clear, dry, 60 degree day.

My snack bar cheeseburger was still warm when this first generation Bronco made me drop the curly fries and grab the camera. Running a 347 stroker, no hood, and obviously no 4×4 gear, this truck ran in the high 10s all day. I didn’t get to speak with the driver but the quick look I got up close gave me all kinds of hope for converting my Jeep pickup into a quarter mile machine.

The lone racing AMC of the day was this Hornet wearing the factory colors:

Also fun to watch was this wheel-lifting VW rod:

One more wild one was this altered racer. There’s a little background info on this one at Piecrustmagazine: