Drive It Like You Stole It
Hero driver, on the track in an Aston Martin DB9. For $5,000, this could be you.
Photo: Supercar Life
It's all very nice to rent a supercar from one of the proliferating upscale services such as Gotham Dream Cars, about which I blogged recently, but then what? After you're through showing "your" temporary 
Ferrari or Aston Martin to the neighbors and wowing your sigother, you're out on the highway bound by the same speed limits, laws and simple commonsense that fetters every Toyota Corolla commuter. Wouldn't it be nice if you had a race course where you could open up that whip legally, take it well into triple-digit speeds, corner on the limit and drive it like you stole it?
You, pal, need to talk to a new company called Supercar Life. They own 10 of the world’s most exotic two-seaters -- Ferrari F430, Lamborghini Gallardo, Porsche 911 Turbo, Aston Martin DB9 and Mercedes-Benz CLK63 AMG Black Series, two of each -- and for $5,000, they’ll let you spend an entire day driving each of them on a track. And that five grand includes luxury-hotel accommodations, meals, airport ground transfers, pro-driver instruction and an in-car video of you making like Michael Schumacher. (Having been subjected to racetrack videos by various brothers and friends, I can tell you that if you have a DVD player at the office, the put-your-coworkers-to-sleep potential is enormous.)
Here's the deal:
The Supercar Life team travels around the country, taking their cars and driving instructors to a variety of well-known road courses, and they schedule track days with a maximum of 15 clients a day to drive the cars. Drivers get separated into three groups of five, and they rotate through 1/a classroom chalk-talk session, 2/time on an acceleration/slalom/hard-braking course with an instructor so they can get a feel for the car under extreme conditions and 3/driving on the track both with an instructor and solo.
How is it possible to put in serious harm's way cars that cost from $125,000 to $180,000, to say nothing of the delicate noggins of the amateurs driving them, since there’s absolutely no prior supercar experience required? Fortunately, each of these cars has a superb electronic stability-control system that simply won't allow the car to go out of control. (If you turn the stability control off, which can be done to allow a pro to go superfast, you need to remember that you signed a waiver making you responsible for any damage if you do so. Otherwise, you're fully insured.)
The other hoonage inhibitor that you should know about, just so you won't be dismayed when you discover it, is that all solo driving is done in a follow-the-leader train, with an instructor in the lead. I've done a lot of this kind of lead/follow driving behind professionals, and believe me, they can assess your competence with a quick glance into their rearview mirror, and the better you are, the faster they'll go. They're not there to slow you down but to keep you from doing something crazy.
Supercar Life has events coming up in January and February near West Palm Beach, Florida (Moroso Motorsports Park) and then Miami (Homestead Miami Speedway), so if you're heading south for the sun, here's a play-day to consider scheduling. In April, the cars will most likely be in the LA area, at the California Speedway in Fontana.
Five thousand dollars might superficially sound expensive, but it's in fact something of a bargain. Knowing the cost of racetrack rental, driving-instructor salaries, frequent performance-tire replacement costs, inevitable exoticar maintenance, Ritz-caliber hotel costs and the expense of what I make to be about $1,500,000 worth of supercars, I'd urge you to jump on this before the price goes up.
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Posted by: hbspsxltc | May 15, 2008 at 01:37 AM