Google me: Leaders and speed - a natural match

By JULIET ROWAN

Motorcades are easy to spot, so one might wonder what Helen Clark's minders were thinking when they ordered her driven at breakneck speed from Timaru to Christchurch in full public view.

The fact that they made the rapid trip, with lights flashing at times, so the PM could get to an All Blacks game was no excuse for Debbie and Raymond Mitchell of Timaru.

The couple told Holmes they were horrified to see the motorcade's three cars travelling at 140km/h to 150km/h in a 50km/h zone in Temuka, just north of Timaru, on Saturday afternoon.

But despite outrage over the "bat out of hell" driving (Waimate Mayor David Owen's words), it was hardly unique. A quick look at Google shows world leaders have been chauffeured around in similar fashion for decades.

A "speeding motorcade" search yesterday produced 2170 entries.

Top of the list was a news story that had much in common with the Helen Clark incident, including the offender's name: Wesley Clark (a former US presidential hopeful).

And, like Timaru, Oklahoma wasn't about to let some big-wig in a motorcade think he could cruise its roads at whatever speed he liked.

When a state trooper pulled over Mr Clark's three-car convoy convoy, he fined each driver US$150 ($229).

The motorcade's speed: 88mph (142km/h) in a 75mph (120km/h) zone - only 22km/h over the limit and therefore not breaking the law by as much as Helen Clark's cars, according to the Mitchells' account.

Former California Governor Gray Davis was another politician stung when his motorcade was caught at 94mph (151km/h) on a 55mph (89km/h) stretch of road in August 2003.

But elsewhere on the web, speeding motorcades show themselves to be an accepted symbol of power.

On February 1 last year, the day Nasa lost the Space Shuttle Columbia, a senior official in the Bush Administration told CNN that the President rushed from Camp David to the White House "via a speeding motorcade", conjuring up images of urgent, focused reaction. (Arguably little different from Helen Clark's urgent need to make her flight from Christchurch to Wellington in time for the Bledisloe Cup game.)

But just because motorcades exude power, doesn't mean they can protect the powerful.

Most famously. John F. Kennedy was assassinated while travelling in a motorcade of convertible limousines and police motorcycles through the streets of Dallas, Texas, in 1963.

Reports of the day immortalised the motorcade fleeing the scene in popular memory, with Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis in "the Schiaparelli pink suit stained with her husband's blood, her gaunt stunned face in the blur of the speeding motorcade".