I'm going to "brake" the rules (get it....he he). My story wasn't a camper, but I was towing a 40' gooseneck race car hauler.
Towing from Upstate NY to Epping NH for a X275 race with my F350 SuperDuty, 7.3 hopped up Diesel and a 40' Featherweight trailer. All loaded with race car and equipment I was towing around 12,000 lbs, and about 18,000 total. The truck had a western hauler bed made out of 1/8" steel and was HEAVY. Anyway, even with tip top brake pads and shoes on the truck and trailer, I always thought the brakes were marginal especially at highway speeds.
So, my dad and me are towing along @ 65 mph with traffic and came to the I84-I495 split towards Boston. I was in the right lane and a woman drove by us in the passing lane texting on her phone and I immediately thought, good thing she's in front of me in case I need to stop as traffic was picking up immensely.The highways merge from one set of 2 lanes into 4 lanes with the 2 additional lanes coming in from our right. With the heavy traffic coming on my right, I moved over into the left lane ....1/8 mile or so behind texting woman. We came around a curve and because she had been distracted she had to do basically a panic stop as the merging traffic had bottlenecked in front of her( I always watch the tail light of the car in front of me entering blind areas...doesn't work well when they have to panic stop, lol ). So here we come probably close to 70 mph barreling down on essentially stopped traffic.To make matters worse the area where the bottleneck was happening was on the onset to a flyover bridge, so imaging the left side shoulder disappearing and an armco barrier arriving from my left and tapering to the bridge. I go into a full on panic stop, brake pressure couldn't get much higher, I set the left side of the truck on the shoulder as I was approaching the stopped traffic. Now I am literally next to the car in front of us back by their left rear door and coming fast to the armco that had started way down in the median and is "V-ing" up to the bridge where you end up with about 18" of shoulder. My plan was to hit the guardrail first (at this point I was only a couple inches away from the rail on my left) and try to minimize the damage inflicted to the cars in front of me. I fully expected to take out the texting car, the one stopped in front of her and possibly one in front of that.By the grace of God the right hand traffic had slowed just enough to have some space in it and at the last second the texting car, the one in front of her and the one in front of him all dove to the right lane simultaneously as they saw the wreck coming. I eased the rig off the guardrail just in time to look in my left mirror and see the rear of the trailer miss the rail by what seemed like thousandths of an inch. This all happened in seconds, no time to talk, yell, tell my dad to hold on, nothing. When I whipped it back in the driving lane it was a good minute before dad or I said a word. And I'm pretty sure the first words were regarding the smell (and smoke) coming from the brakes. I drove for another 15-20 miles to let the brakes cool before stopping at a rest stop. Thought I was going to puke, Still not sure to this day how we got out of that one, but it was a real eye opener about traffic distance. Luckily I was always adamant about setting up my brake controller to not lock up the trailer brakes. Too close.
