Three days a week, Tiffany Bensen plays raceway roulette, threading her aging Honda through the metallic rapids of rush hour that roar between her home in Durham and her job at N.C. State.

As she motors down the Durham Freeway and Interstate 40, cars flash past on her left and right, always moving far faster than the speed limit and her 22-year-old auto, a tired piece of iron with no air bags and more than 240,000 miles on the odometer.

From her precarious perch, she sees all the hallmarks of Triangle drivers gone bad -- sudden lane changes, drivers yakking on cell phones, tailgating galore. All done at a velocity that makes the posted speed limit a rank irrelevancy.

And that's just what passes for normal behavior on Triangle freeways. At least twice a week, Bensen says, she sees an utterly rogue motorist, rocketing past the pack, evading gridlock by riding on the shoulders or bullying slower cars with a staccato blip of the high beams and a razor-close ride near the rear bumper.

"Those people are risking my life, and they just have no clue," the 41-year-old research entomologist said. "They're really selfish and ignorant and don't understand the consequences if something goes wrong at that speed."

Bensen asks a simple question and provides her own answer: "Is there a speed limit or is there not? Apparently, there is not." And that begs another question: What's the big rush?

Americans have felt the need for speed ever since Barney Oldfield raced his first Ford in 1902.

It's a passion fed by the thunderous popularity of NASCAR and the ceaseless marketing of automakers who push the 0-to-60 mph times of their latest models. Think Mazda and that kid whispering: "Zoom-zoom." Think Tony, Junior and Jeff going three wide at Talladega. Think of a hard-core race fan doing some too-close drafting in the fast lane of I-40.

"We are hard-wired for speed, and the technology we have makes that more appealing and possible," said Kenneth Mills, a Chapel Hill psychologist and author of "Disciplined Attention: How to Improve Your Visual Attention When You Drive."

Speed is the brutish side of the car as status symbol, an aggressive form of cool that crosses the generational divide. It's Steve McQueen, his dark-green '68 Mustang fastback and the car chase in "Bullitt." It's McQueen brought back from the dead two years ago in a Ford commercial that hawked the retro styling of its redesigned pony car.

Fast driving is also a byproduct of modern lives crammed to the nanosecond with the demands of home and office, church and school -- and spouses, kids and bosses. And in a nick-of-time world of faster computers and instant messaging, ever more rapid road velocity seems like another way of having it all -- right now, speed limit be hanged.

"People just are in a hurry to get to where they're going, and speed limits are just getting in the way of getting there," said Glen Gray, a Hillsborough lawyer who was once one of the Triangle's top ticket-fixers. "It's just part of our society now. Everybody has just got so much going on, so many places to be in a given day, that speeding just happens."

No stigma for speeders

Owning seven businesses, including a car wash and several restaurants in Benson, makes Hank Austin Barnes a man in a perpetual rush. It also means he has racked up 19 speeding tickets in the past five years -- almost all of them dismissed or changed to less serious charges, court records show.

"It's the way I'm natured -- I'm hyper," said Barnes, 56, of Angier. "I think I've got to be somewhere at a certain time when I don't. ... I just don't use my head."

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