Chase-Breaking Braking

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If I am escaping in a large truck and the hero is pursuing me in a small Italian sports car, I will not wait for the hero to pull up along side of me and try to force him off the road as he attempts to climb aboard. Instead I will slam on the brakes when he's directly behind me. (A rudimentary knowledge of physics can prove quite useful.)

During a Chase Scene, this happens when the pursued suddenly brakes in order to make the pursuer run into him.

A variation on this exists where the pursued driver doesn't let the other car slam in; he just brakes and lets the other vehicle speed by, meanwhile turning around and going back the way he came.

Examples of Chase-Breaking Braking include:

Anime and Manga

  • In Case Closed, a variant is used to disable a car full of bad guys holding a man hostage: they box him in, and then the car in the front slams on the breaks, causing the bad guys inside to lose their grip on the hostage and allowing the police to move in and arrest them all without causing too much harm on said hostage.

Comics

  • Tintin:
    • Tintin is on a motorcycle and chasing a carful of baddies. The baddies slam on the brakes, Tintin gets knocked off his bike, baddies zoom off.
    • Tintin and some others are riding in a car. Unknown to them, the car in front of them is full of bad guys. As they're passing by a lake, the car in front brakes, and Tintin's car gets knocked into the lake.

Film

Tabletop Games

  • Spelljammer has a few ships (starting from Neogi Mindspider) with aft ram. Of course, circumstances when it can be used are rather limited, and even then it's more of an extra edge than common tactics. While ramming in pursuit is useful, it's somewhat underwhelming: ram damage is proportional to the difference in speed. When one can change speed suddenly, it works better than ramming a ship that runs away, but a missing ram attack still exposes one both to possible counter-ramming and to risk of shearing (losing one's rigging). Thus a more common way to deter pursuers is more versatile and repeatable one: use of aft jettisons to deploy debris clouds (overloaded shot instead of the usual anti-personnel scatter shot).

Web Original

134. If I am driving a large truck and The Hero is chasing me in a small Italian sports car, I will not let him pull alongside and try to force him off the road. Instead I will slam on the brakes when he's directly behind me. A rudimentary knowledge of physics can be useful.

Western Animation

  • Storm Hawks:
    • In the pilot, the Condor, The Storm Hawks' carrier ship, is tailed by the Raptors. Stork does this to them.

Stork: I hate tailgaters.

    • In episode 31, Aerrow is chased by Hoerk at one point. He brakes, clipping Hoerk's skimmer with his own and sending him spinning out of control.
    • In episode 49, when Finn is on Marge's ship and they're being attacked by Talons, Marge pulls on the brake once the Talons are behind them, causing their skimmers to collide with the much larger airship.