SUPERCAR GAME CHANGERS
AN 18-YEAR-OLD DRIVES HIS DAD’S car on the open road. His wide-eyed friend, camcorder in hand, is a willing passenger and fellow prisoner of gravity, head and torso occasionally driven back into the seat as if struck by a palm punch from the Incredible Hulk himself. He giggles and looks slightly scared. The kid behind the wheel of the black Dodge Viper is just playing, though, boost dialled back to mere ‘pre-disorientation’. A bit of harmless YouTube fun. He’s driven his dad’s Viper faster than this. Way faster in the space of a quarter mile. Note to Dominic ‘Fast and Furious’ Toretto: it’s a six-second car, baldie. And, passed down from his dad, the true meaning of ‘family’. The kid owns it.
At 18, I had a poster of a Lamborghini Countach on my bedroom wall and a rusty, baby blue, 435cc, left-hand-drive, ex-Belgian midwife’s Citroën 2CV, its body listing to port, parked on the drive of my parents’ house. I was thrilled it would do 0-60mph. Just. Not only could I live with that, I had to. More germane to my vision of a life without limits, I owned a poster of the most desirable object in the world: an impossibly yellow and fantastical four-wheeled bolide that took up all my daydreaming slack and most of my classroom paying attention time, too.
A little early to be making a bucket list, maybe, but getting behind the wheel of a Countach 5000 Quattrovalvole and giving it death was the founding entry. I had to wait a decade for the opportunity and, when it happened, it was, without question, the thrill of my life to that point. Of course, no one knew what the future would hold but, even then, the idea that a supercar’s superiority over all other road going vehicles should be arbitrated by a 0-60mph time and top speed – essentially a red rag to the more bullish tuners and modifiers of the world – had already ignited a pace race that would ultimately give us hot hatchbacks that could out-drag any 1990s supercar, 1000bhpplus hypercars intended to restore the natural performance hierarchy and, out on the fringes admittedly, an 18-year-old kid’s 3200bhp Viper capable of
