Supercars: Not Just For Hard Parking*

Hard-parking - Noun.  When one owns a high-performance vehicle which he only drives to and from the garage to the car show. Used in a sentence: "Stop hard parking your car, take it out to the tracks." Hard parking is that guy you know with the sweet M3 with the sweet BBS wheels and the sweet carbon-fibre everything and the sweet AP Racing big brake kit and Tein coilovers and carbon-bucket Recaros and oh my god it's a Grouppe M carbon intake, and all he does it park it up, sparkling clean with the hood up at Euro-snob car shows.  Boo on you, pansies.  Fast cars are meant to be driven heard.  Allow me to explain.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6m9Yomop92Y

A Lamborghini Countach was not equipped with a 48-valve V12 just so you can drive it to Cars and Coffee really early on Saturday morning and have everyone stare at it.  It has a Colombo-designed V12 because it's fast.  The fact that it sounds like an air-raid siren, I think, is just an added benefit to Countach ownership.  Sure, the Countach isn't that fast by modern standards, but it's not a museum art piece.  It's a car.  Drive it like a car.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKG4JkBAe8M

The F355 was (and still is) a gorgeous car to look at, but frankly I'd much rather hear it's 3.5L 40 valve flat-plane V8 bouncing off the rev limiter than stare at it all day long.  The sound is unbelievable!

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ds_FDKIK-I

Acura's NSX is a point of debate for supercar fans.  Some say it's not a supercar because it only has a 3.0L V6 and doesnt' require a new clutch and a valve job every year.  Others say that's horsecrap, then boost 11psi on a turbo setup on their early 3.0L NSX and rip third gear on the highway like a man.  Seems fast enough to me!

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nd_5cVIMv0

The Porsche Carrera GT was a $440,000 piece of engineering braggery.  It wasn't designed for any racing series despite it's Le Mans pedigree, it has a traditional manual transmission in a class where flappy paddles are the rule not the exception, and I've heard it's an unbelievable bitch to drive in traffic thanks to the on-off clutch.  So it makes sense you'd usually see these parked at a car show, with fan boys drooling.  I prefer seeing one cutting repeated donuts, V10 howling and tires dying, in the middle of a public road.  Like this one.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7Yf719FeQ8

Did you know the Lamborghini Murcielago will smoke it's rear tires when you launch it really hard, despite being 4WD?  Me neither.  And I doubt most Murcielago owners are aware, either.  Next time you see one, ask!

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvYAMNc6shs

Ok, this one was shot at a car show, but still - give the guy some credit.  He's just beating the hell out of this gorgeous Ferrari 550 Maranello, drifting it, almost wrecking it, and generally turning expensive Pirellis into delicious carcinogens.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkWLif5ggN0

Most people with Lamborghini Gallardos probably buy them because they say Lamborghini on the front, and the keyfob makes it easier to get girls into your car at the club.  At least that's what I think.  Most people probably don't buy a manual Gallardo, much less send that Gallardo off to Heffner performance to have twin intercooled turbochargers installed.  They also probably don't give rides to video bloggers, who film them ripping 2nd through 4th gear on a high-way onramp to well past 100mph.  But this guy does, and therefore he wins an entire internet.  Congratulations, anonymous twin-turbo Gallardo owner!  Gold star!  Good lord!

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHZxx3G1TDk

The McLaren-Mercedes SLR was a beautiful, if contrived car.  It had a complex carbon-fibre monocoque chassis, a very powerful supercharged V8, brakes the size of a dinner plate, but it was saddled with a 5-speed automatic and face-through-the-windshield brake by wire.  Still, F1 champion Lewis Hamilton is a man that knows his way around making a Mercedes do a burnout - he did get his C63 AMG impounded in Australia for doing one on a public road, those fun-hating bastards - and it seems he was quite fond of doing them in SLR McLarens, as there are multiple clips of him killing tires in different SLR's all across YouTube.  This is my favorite: Hamilton at the wheel of a safety orange SLR 722 Roadster, at Goodwood FoS, doing burnouts and doughnuts with one hand.  Winning.

This is just a taste of the exotic hoonage you can find on YouTube.  If you've got a favorite rich-guy-beating-on-an-exotic-like-it-was-mom's-minivan video that I missed out on, feel free to drop a link in the comments.

Lead/intro image via blogs.warwick.ac.uk