Dear Bingley: I have heard of "lead-footed" drivers, but not the expression you mentioned. When I was small, the expression for someone driving too fast was "forty miles an hour". For purposes of exaggeration "going like sixty".
You didn't expect anyone to believe that.
My father had a six cylinder Peerless, with one of the first broad bore, short stroking engines.I remember his going 96 mph on a long straight stretch, when I was perhaps ten years old. Some of the Stanley Steamers at that time could go faster, but I never had a ride in one. Allegedly the builder offered a cash reward to anyone who dared floor and hold the accelerator on one of those. No internal combustion engine of the time could match it. But it took several hours to get the steam pressure up, and you had to be sure you could get pure water for the boiler before you had gone very far.