Castle Combe grp B car club and audi q track day (long)

[quk@isham-research.demon.co.uk (Phil Payne)]

In message <00503595500870@abcs.com> "Dave Aukerman" writes:

> Gee Phil, this on the heels of you claiming to _never_ drink and drive.

Am I supposed to walk for a week after every glass of sherry?  I should
point out that not only did I pass the test (and it's an objective
machine) but I was waved off without even a caution or any further
comment about the 51 mph.

I use a system I picked up in Germany.  Alcohol is not absorbed by
fatty tissue, but only by those parts of the body containing water.
Thus, you need to know how "big" you really are under all the fat.  We
all have some, BTW.  Fat guys get just as drunk as thin ones for the
same amount of booze.

The Mainz 77 model uses so-called "reduced body weight".  A good guess
starts with the lesser of your height in cm minus 100 or your body
weight in kg.

You then multiply this by 0.7 if you're male or 0.6 if you're female.
Sorry, girls - you _do_ get drunk faster because there's more fat in
a female body.  The result of this calculation is normally a constant
for life - in my case it's 49kg.

Then you need to know how much alcohol is involved.  In the UK, by law,
_all_ alcoholic beverages on sale must be clearly marked with the
alcohol content - ABV, or alcohol by volume.  The beer I took to Roger's
was 3.7% ABV.

We split it three ways - a pint each, or 590ml.  That's 21.8ml of
alcohol, or 17.5gm in weight.  Alcohol's specific gravity relative
to water is 0.8, as I'm sure you know.

Dividing one into the other gives 35.6 milligrams of alcohol per 100
millilitres of 'blood'.  So that's the _highest_ level I could have
recorded at any time yesterday evening, assuming I slugged it all down
in one go.

However - we started at 19:00 and the beer was all gone by 21:00.  Even
if the peak had been at 21:00 or shortly thereafter, we have to allow
for the elimination rate, which in my case is around 12 milligrams per
hour.  In theory, I could have cleared the lot out by the time I set off
from Roger's - in practice, it tends to tail off when the concentration
gets low.

I would guess that I was between 10 milligrams and 15 milligrams per
100 millilitres.  The police meter registered, but they were quite
unconcerned about the levels.  The legal limit is 80 in the UK,
although you _can_ theoretically have a level of 50 taken into account
if you're in an accident.

--
 Phil Payne
 Phone: 0385 302803   Fax: 01536 723021
 (The contents of this post will _NOT_ appear in the UK Newsletter.)