The Swift—ubiquitous in Hungary as it was the first car manufactured in this country—is positively dwarfed by this Mopar monstrosity, seen here in top-of-the-line SRT8 trim, with the 6.1-liter engine and the appropriate Hemi Orange paintjob.

The scene is full of little surprises. Like how you could make a whole new set of wheels for the little Suzuki from the material found in one Challanger wheel. Or how it shows that even downtown parking spaces are indeed giant when compared to the average car: it takes 16.5 feet of American muscle to fill one to the brim.

It’s a wonderful sight in Budapest, this Challenger, comically inappropriate, with a punk swagger often missing from city cars. And while we know that the perfect city car is the Mercedes-Benz W140 S600, this come pretty close.

All you need now is plenty of Hungarian gasoline. At $6 a gallon. Yeehaw!

Ford Mustang Shelby GT500

This is the very last car I rode in on the American continent. Wert showed up with it just as I was heading out of Jalopnik publisher Gawker Media’s Soho offices to subway to JFK. Contrary to my preconceptions, it is a very nice car.

Much more compact than either the Challenger or the Camaro, the big Mustang is a surprisingly nice place to be in. The plastics are uprange Opel, meaning nowhere near Alfa Romeo Euro-poshness but perfectly okay.

While the doorframe is certainly on the high side, you can stick your elbow out without having to worry about the sudden onset of Saturday night palsy, which is very much not the case in neither the Challenger nor the Camaro. And what is a muscle car without an elbow out the window, after all?

It was a fun 20 MPH ride in bumper to bumper traffic, over the Manhattan Bridge and into Brooklyn. Ray will have a full road test up in the coming days. And I certainly hope he will mention the shift knob, which looks (cue Nascar-like Southern drawl) "totally awesome."

Photo Credit: Ray Wert

Dodge Challenger R/T

The Challenger faced impossible odds: it was our chariot of choice in heavy traffic on the Long Island Expressway on our way to see a Lamborghini Miura. While no earthly car can approach the magic of the Miura, the Challenger failed in every way. The inside is decked out in plastics I would not store leftovers meant for dogs in. The shifter is a wobblefest, the A/C is only good for causing sudden onset hypothermia and cocking an elbow out the window is not recommended if you’re worried in the slightest about the health of your radial nerve.

The car may look fun in the pages of a magazine, but in real life, it just does not work. Yes, every modern American muscle car is a clear derivative of 40-year-old designs but while the Camaro and especially the Mustang display elements of modern thinking, the Challenger is at best a cartoon approximation of a scene from Vanishing Point. It is not in visual harmony with its environment.

Riding in the car with me was Natalie Polgar of Hyperleggera, a svelte and attentive driver, who pointed out the lack of grunt from the very loud 5.7-liter Hemi and the curious lack of cornering finesse.

If you have no elbows—and, consequently, no fingertips for feeling materials—and like driving at night in a straight line, this might be your car. Otherwise, steer clear.

Photo Credit: Natalie Polgar

Chevrolet Camaro RS

A fleeting glance this was not: I spent two days in this car, riding from New York City to Detroit and back, a total of over 1200 miles. Pictured above is that most Detroit of scenes, the abandoned Michigan Central Station, which we approached on a late Sunday morning as inner city residents were tending to their vegetable plots set up in its forlorn flowerbeds.

While the Camaro’s interior is a notch above the Challenger’s, the materials used would never fly in Europe, except perhaps in the lowliest of vehicles. But most surprising is the utter lack of interior space in a 16-foot car weighing close to two tons. Fitting a 6'2" frame into the back seats of any coupé is a challenge, but I have never seen anything as bad as the Camaro. There is much more space in a 1973 Lamborghini Espada—or a Fiat Punto, a European supermini a full four feet shorter than the Camaro. There is room for neither knees nor heads. You might be tempted to say that the point of a muscle car is definitely not the rear seat transport of males in the upper three percent of the height curve—and you might be correct. Still, it is an egregiously bad use of space.

The 3.6-liter V6 in the RS is not the engine to get if you decide to buy a Camaro. It develops 300 HP, which is sucked up by the car’s osmium heft, leaving you with sluggish acceleration. The big LS3 V8 must be way more fun.

Still, despite its bad design, it was in the Camaro that I finally understood the point of the American automobile. It was late night in a straight line somewhere out in the Detroit suburbs, the landscaped forests causing the 90+ degrees of the afternoon to plunge, and at a dreamy 60 MPH Pink Floyd was on the radio. But more on that later.

The verdict? Avoid the Challenger, try the Mustang. And if you do pick up the Camaro, grab a Dremel and finish the job of cutting air vents for the rear brakes. They were there on the concept Camaro but regressed to fake indentations on the production model, which really is a shame but perhaps reflects on the creeping sense of sloppy design.

To call my insertion on the left side of the Atlantic eagerly anticipated would be quite the understatement. Despite my inherent Euro-ness, I have actually spent a cumulative three years of my life in the United States, including a number of formative months in an Oldsmobile Omega. So after being out of the country for five and a half years, I couldn’t wait to come back—if only to find out whether frosted Wild! Magicburst-flavored Pop-Tarts really do exist or are but whims of my consumerist fancy.

Barely 72 hours after touchdown at JFK, I was already rumbling out to Long Island in the shotgun seat of a Dodge Challenger R/T, the 5.7-liter V8 propelling us all the way to 50 MPH on the Long Island Expressway. Here’s a quick take on this lovely caricature of the American car:

• The Hemi sounds awesome if subdued
• The interior is—and I’m at pains to not put it bluntly—not something one would expect to find in a passenger vehicle
• The air conditioning is, like every example of American air conditioning, testament to a shady conspiracy by manufacturers of medication for urinary tract infections. Yes, AC is a wonderful invention but there really is no need to cool cars, subway cars and stores alike to 60 degrees Fahrenheit when it’s 90+ outside. The wimpy European body withers at 30+ degree temperature walls

Even in the crawling midday traffic, I soon escaped the expressway and—accompanied by Natalie Polgar of Hyperleggera and Brett Berk of Vanity Fair—folded myself into something a bit more European:

But more on this later! I shall be in New York City, Detroit and Washington, D.C. over the next three weeks. Suggestions on very American—or very un-American—cars to see in this area are more than welcome.

Photo Credit: Natalie Polgar and the author

With a political class comprised of imbeciles, Communists, thieves and a strong selection of imbecile Communists turned thieves who operate a hungry and comically inept state, Hungary is not exactly a success story in recent years. A refreshing exception to the general malaise is the local drift scene, which has grown by leaps and bounds since its birth around 2005.

Fueled by an abundance of BMW E30’s and inspired by AE86-o-philes braving the incompetence and plundering of the local postal and customs services to order specialist components from Japan, drifting happens all over the country. I have written about it before, but if you don’t consider a thousand words your friends, I strongly suggest watching this 3'35" video of a recent drift contest, held at the Kakucsring racetrack 30 miles southeast of Budapest. It was edited by whiz kid György Szeljak, whose work has been featured on Jalopnik before, and the only spoken Hungarian words translate to “pool party on Friday,” so don’t fret about volumes of Moon language.

Apart from that, it’s 215 seconds of noise, smoke, ratty Bimmers, suave tsuiso moves and incredible camera angles. Don’t miss the Jolly Roger joining the Hungarian flag on a rear wing tacked to the bootlid of an RX-8.

Reader bzr had this to say about my virulent dislike of the Alfa Romeo 8C Competizione:

I still believe the 8C is the most beautiful car ever built, period. Not most beautiful NEW car, but the most beautiful in all 120 years of motoring. You can show me a picture of a Miura and try to make me eat my words, but that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Here's one that'll make you ready your cutlery as I tell you how I popped my Miura cherry.

I was deathly afraid as I approached the car on a muggy April day in Italy. I had been a car nerd for years. I had just seen Ralph Lauren’s Mercedes-Benz “Count Trossi” SSK the previous day. And a Ferrari 121 LM Scaglietti Spyder race car parked casually in front of a general store, the very car Eugenio Castellotti had raced in 1955 in Le Mans. Yet the Miura remained my Eldorado, the lynchpin of my geeky heart, and I bet Captain Ahab was in no hurry to meet Moby Dick either. Obsessions are best left for the mind.

What if I see it and it proves to be just another old sports car? I already knew about its deep flaws. Hot, noisy and uncomfortable, with the fuel tank sitting above the front axle so steering precision went out the door as you used up the gas. The racing Weber carburetors mounted on the V12 had a tendency to catch fire. And so on.

I inch my way toward a wall with the Miura’s butt sticking out from the other side and my friend Larry says: “There’s your Miura.”

You all know how this car came to be. How a spited tractormaker set up shop near Enzo Ferrari’s factory. How he hired the engineers Ferrari had fired and how Giotto Bizzarrini, one of those engineers, designed the Lamborghini V12 still in use today. Ferruccio Lamborghini paid him by the horsepower, gently scolding him when his first engine prototype produced all of those HP at a dentist’s drill of 11,000 RPM. He was not out to make a racing car.

What made the Miura revolutionary was, of course, its mid-engined layout, which was finally becoming standard on racing cars. But apart from Alejandro de Tomaso’s cute fiberglass Vallelunga, no one had attempted to use the design on a road car.

The advantages of the layout on a racetrack result from classical mechanics. Watch what happens when you sling a front-engined car into a corner too fast!

Why is the bunny in peril? The speed and ease with which a car can change direction while moving in a curve is related to its moment of inertia. Having weighty components on the extremities, like a heavy engine up front, will increase that value.

What this means is that a car built like that will try to exit the curve along a tangent, as that Ferrari 250 GTO did in the video. Let’s freeze a frame to see its intended versus its actual motion:

If you want track bunnies to survive, you want to place the engine as close as possible to the axis of the car around which it turns. This will lessen its moment of inertia. A field of happy bunnies will greet your design:

In the hands of a skilled driver, a front-engined car will also stay on the road, but its cornering speed will be lower than that of a mid-engined car with similar power and similar weight. This is why all major races from Formula 1 through the Indianapolis 500 to Le Mans have been won by mid-engined cars since the mid-60s.

Why does all this apply to the Miura, a road car? On the road, a mid-engined design offers no distinct advantages. For one, you don’t really come into close contact with your car’s moment of inertia in city traffic. Having the engine behind the driver’s compartment also comes with a number of issues: it kills passenger and trunk space, introduces cooling problems, and makes engine access a major pain.

But the most baffling aspect is that mid-engined cars are not very pretty. Your classic front-engined coupé is the body type most pleasing to the human eye when it comes to interpreting automobile shapes. The Pagani Zonda is certainly a gorgeous fighter jet with magnesium wheels, but understanding its beauty requires careful study and a lot of effort. The pulchritude of a Ferrari 250 GTO, on the other hand, is well within the congitive range of the Jerusalem artichoke, a species of sunflower not known for its mental acumen.

Even though Lamborghini had set out to create a road car which was faster through curves than other cars, he must have been fully aware that he was in the supercar business. And in the supercar business, you sell sex appeal. Your customers will like knowing about your advanced design but they will never use it to its full potential. What they will use is the looks.

I mull over all this with trepidation as I finally round the wall and come face to face with the Lamborghini Miura for the first time. And boy, does it have the looks! Expecting disappointment and a major dose of post-rapture alienation, I fall instead in love for real. It is very pretty in a wholly automotive way.

But how can it be mid-engined and pretty at the same time?

The Miura is a big car, much bigger than you’d expect from photos, and that hood which houses nothing but a spare tire goes on for miles. It sits impossibly low and very wide. When you peek inside, you get the same sense of exhilirating discomfort as you get with the 33 Stradale. Only this time, there are 12 instead of 8 velocity stacks to chomp on loose hair and babies. And then the car ends in a swift swoop.

Parked in front of the Miura is a Ferrari 599 GTB. It is the bigger car and it sits higher too, an exceptionally well-proportioned grand tourer. And as I look at the Ferrari and look back at the Miura, it dawns on me: these two are the same car.

The Miura deceives you to think it’s front-engined!

It shares with the 599 the same profile, the same curves, the same sense of harmony. The Miura is beautiful because it is disguised as a front-engined berlinetta. The incredibly long nose, the transversely mounted V12? They are there to tug you gently into the future of supercar design. Remember, this is 1965. Humans have yet to see the dark side of the Moon.

The Miura has to work very hard for its beauty. It needs to deceive the eye from every angle. One wrong curve and the suspension of disbelief is gone. But no matter where you look, it never is.

Beauty, indeed, in the eye of the deceived beholder.

Photo Credit for Ferrari 250 GTO: exfordy

You just know something’s amiss when you are greeted with FIA president Max Mosley’s very British grimace on Jalopnik as you boot up in the morning. Turns out “Formula 1 is finished,” as two-time world champion Fernando Alonso has described the current situation to the BBC.

The current situation is only slightly simpler than the internal politics of Afghanistan, with power-hungry old white men scheming behind closed doors. The only difference seems to be their lack of flowing beards and Stinger missiles—but then Max Mosley would make a great Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

What is the current situation, exactly? Most of the major teams have refused to accept Mosley’s scheme to turn Formula One into a two-tiered, budget regulated series, with teams who agree to run on an arbitrary budget set by Mosley getting access to slacker regulations: higher revving engines, more aggressive aerodynamics, the works. The teams have correctly argued that this runs against the very essence of Formula One: namely, that cars built to the same set of regulations–or formulae–race each other. Bunny rabbits may occasionally race against the cars, as seen at last year’s British Grand Prix, but they do not figure in the official results.

Mosley’s fear seems to be that current expenditures will drive major manufacturers out of the sport as car companies will not be willing to pay half a billion dollars a year for a vanity product in these financially bleak times. So far, the only manufacturer which has actually quit was Honda—but not before handing former team principal Ross Brawn the current season’s most dominant car, the BGP-001, campaigned with an 86% win rate thus far by Jenson Button.

Just to put Mosley’s budget cap in perspective: his suggested $65 million a year is exactly half as much as the amount paid a week ago by a Spanish football team for a single player. Great footballers have their price, even obnoxious bastards like Real Madrid’s latest pick Cristiano Ronaldo, but they certainly don’t require expensive, one-off machines made of carbon fiber and titanium to do their thing.

It’s all very sad, really, but is perhaps an inevitable conclusion to the bullying and thuggery Max Mosley and commercial rights holder Bernie Ecclestone have subjected Formula One to over the past decades. While many involved in F1 have become very rich in the meantime, the biggest money was made not by the people who actually go out there and race cars, but the very few who have brokered deals.

It may be unavoidable or it may be a historical artifact dating back to the late 70s when the very same duo made Formula One into the global media juggernaut it currently is. But it has certainly not helped the sport’s long-term survival. Formula One at the moment is subject to rapid, arbitrary rule changes and it is increasingly raced on tracks worlds away from the sport’s historic and financial heartlands—Europe and North America.

The series began in 1950 at Silverstone, a converted airfield in postwar England which will host its last race this Sunday. The teams have until today evening to reach a last minute compromise. Otherwise, the cars on the grid on Sunday afternoon may take part in not just the last grand prix at Silverstone—but in the last grand prix of a Formula One with a future.

Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images, DIMITRI KOCHKO/AFP/Getty Images, MAX NASH/AFP/Getty Images, SHAUN CURRY/AFP/Getty Images

The 1957 Cadillac Eldorado Brougham, the 2009 Chevrolet Corvette ZR1 and now this: a Bedford ice cream van. All vehicles which have sprung forth from the garnantuan corpus of General Motors over the decades. They all are awesome. The Caddy and the Vette by default—the Bedford by the copious application of vehicular art.

Bedford Vehicles used to make trucks as the commercial subsidiary of Vauxhall, GM’s British offshoot, before dying a slow, ugly death. Scratch that: it’s lorries, not trucks. Military lorries, ambulances, mobile cinema lorries and the ice cream vans which still dot the British landscape.

Except they generally don’t look like this one, bagged on Prince of Wales Road in Camden Town, around the edges of a council estate (that’s British for project housing). Bedford vans don’t usually come in rich slatherings of bianco fuji paint with a hint of pistachio. Nor did the British commercial vehicle industry ever harbor an especially wholesome relationship with huge-ass chrome dubs. Or screw-on dual exhaust tips.

This lovely van was parked behind thick metal bars, so unfortunately, this is as close as I could get. And no, I had nothing to do with that discarded cone of ice cream. Sometimes, circumstances simply conspire to create car art. I’m sorry, scratch that: it’s lorry art.

Among the first things you notice when you cross the border from Hungary to Romania is the explosion of sunflower yellow. Some of it is due to the yellow stripe in the Romanian national flag, but a more significant contributor is cadmium sulfide: the pigment in the yellow paint used on every taxicab in the country.

I haven’t been to Bucharest since 2005 and this may have changed since their admission to the regulation-happy European Union in 2007, but on my last trip, I asked a Dacia rep about it and he told me that Cadmium Yellow was still legal to use there. This is the paint you need to achieve the rich, saturated yellow you can see on the cab above.

The problem with cadmium is that it “has no constructive purpose in the human body” according to the Wikipedia page of cadmium poisoning, and that’s putting it mildly. The heavy metal will attack bones, lungs and kidneys alike with reckless abandon, leading to osteoporosis, cancer and the whole spectrum of kidney diseases.

Still, it’s a lovely color. Paired with a home-brew rear wing and a sawed-off shotgun exhaust, it transforms a lowly Dacia Logan into a wicked Bucharest cruiser.

Photo Credit: Gergely “AlieN” Antal, R&F Handmade Paints

In January of 1981, my parents packed up their possessions—which included a 5-month-old kid yet to become a car boy—and set out west from the Hungarian city of Szeged to fly all the way to Washington, D.C. We were people from the satellite of an evil empire yet welcomed kindly, in spite of the total sum of 25 American dollars burning a hole in my parents’ pockets, the maximum amount allowed for export by the Communist state when you left the country.

I have no memories. We settled in the Maryland suburb of Rockville, I was sent to a municipal pool to float with American neonates and my dad went to work at the National Cancer Institute to probe the secret life of bacteria.

Then we got a car.

It was a first generation Oldsmobile Omega, as identified by Murilee over iChat, a compact car which has transformed into a proper land yacht in the recollection of my parents. I have no memories of the car. It was a sickly shade of yellow and judging by the only photographic evidence which remains, I rather liked it. So did my dad, who hates cars with a vengeance.

The leviathan Oldsmobile took us scrappy Hungarians all the way up and down the East Coast, it took us to Cape Hatteras in North Carolina where I saw the ocean for the first time in my life. I have no memories of this event, only my mom’s story—usually told with a grin—that the muscular Atlantic waves knocked my dad clear off his knees with me sitting on his neck, sending us both into the surf. We survived.

There are no Oldsmobiles in Hungary, save for a few derelict 88’s slowly melting into the tarmac. In fact, most people with no knowledge of American cars tend to think that oldsmobile is simply an English term for a veteran automobile. I know it’s not.

We came back to Hungary in the summer of ‘82, the Oldsmobile was sold off to a friend, and my first memories would not stick for another year: a single image, lying delirious from a stomach bug in a tent by a swollen, raging river. I have no idea what my furiously developing toddler brain made of the Omega. I don’t even know if it had a V8. Although I guess it did. What else would explain the love affair with the lazy rumble of crossplane V8’s, alien to the European continent.

My family would acquire other Oldsmobiles on later stays in the US. My dad still has an Oldsmobile badge on his keyfob. I recall Oldsmobile’s death from a few years back. And now General Motors has gone bankrupt.

You all have clear memories of American cars. I do not. I can only point your way to P. J. O’Rourke’s elegy in the Wall Street Journal:

In 1970 a Pontiac GTO (may the brand name rest in peace) had horsepower to the number of 370. In the time of one minute, for the space of one foot, it could move 12,210,000 pounds. And it could move those pounds down every foot of every mile of all the roads to the ends of the earth for every minute of every hour until the driver nodded off at the wheel. Forty years ago the pimply kid down the block, using $3,500 in saved-up soda-jerking money, procured might and main beyond the wildest dreams of Genghis Khan, whose hordes went forth to pillage mounted upon less oomph than is in a modern leaf blower.

Goodbye then, Oldsmobile Omega, goodbye.

Photo Credit: László Orosz

The video has no narration and is in black and white, but the soundtrack and the ample helicopter time more than make up for the loss. It’s an interesting period piece from the ultra-rapid decade of aerodynamic development, which took cars from the thin aluminum cigars with no downforce of the mid-60s to the ground effect Lotus 78’s and 79’s which had wings underneath, sucking them to the tarmac.

1969 was only the second year where aerodynamics was in play in Formula One and you can clearly see the results. Every car is equipped with a solid rear wing and various front wings. At the Flugplatz straight, where the no-downforce cars of 1967 would take to the air, ‘69 cars hunker down and stick to the ground.

Also visible is a token nod to safety—roll bars!—accompanied with its total disregard otherwise. People stand inches from a track with no Armco—not even bales of hay.

The race was won by the Jacky Ickx of Belgium in a Brabham. The guy in the ditch at 04:07 is his teammate Piers Courage, who crashed out on lap one. He would become Formula One’s next casualty in less than a year’s time, when he burned to death in his magnesium De Tomaso at the 1970 Dutch Grand Prix. And in just seven years, following Niki Lauda’s famous—and similarly fiery—crash, Formula One would be gone from the Nürburgring Nordschleife for good.

Photo Credit: Lothar Spurzem/Wikipedia (the picture depicts Bruce McLaren driving his M7C during practice for the race and you can download it at 2,098×1,529)

In his last article published by The Atlantic—How to Get a Nuclear Bomb, which later became the first chapter of the book The Atomic Bazaar—William Langewiesche recalls a conversation with an operator in Russia’s nuclear bureaucracy. Their discussion is about the ease with which nuclear weapons can be acquired by any state willing to build them:

“Once a country has made the decision to become a nuclear-weapons power, it will become one regardless of any guarantees. You needn’t be rich. You needn’t be technically developed. You can be Pakistan, Libya, North Korea, Iran. You can be …” He searched for a country even more absurd in his estimation. He said, “You can be Hungary.”

Stinging though it may be for my fellow Hungarians, the Russian’s quick analysis is certainly spot on. While starving North Korea has detonated a Hiroshima-size nuke this Monday, the last glory days of Hungarian military might were way back in the 15th century, when the Black Army of King Matthias Corvinus romped about Central Europe under one hell of a military flag, wreaking havoc every which way. It’s been all downhill from there.

So it is certainly an occasion when a Lamborghini Countach is spotted on the streets of this sad, lonely outpost on the very edge of Western civilization. But then you have to remember that in outposts, appearances can deceive. Which entails that when you start counting a Countach’s cylinders, you come to a sudden halt after six:

And realize that it’s probably not a Countach after all, but a Pontiac Fiero with a body kit.

The only solace for a rueful Hungarian nationalist would be the fact that we would have neither nukes nor the car that put America on wheels without Hungarians (1, 2, 3, 4).

Photo Credit: Balazs Keki

A few hours after we published our in-depth interview with Stile Bertone’s new design director Jason Castriota, I was standing by Lake Como with him showing me the secrets of his first Bertone design, the Mantide.

The front fenders melt into wings behind the front wheels then draw up into a single taut bunch—reminiscent of a calf muscle—which in turn passes under an archway similar to Castriota’s famous C-pillar for the Ferrari 599 GTB. The confluence of curves and LED’s in the back is, when viewed from a step back, a classic Kamm tail. While retaining the tried-and-true shape of the fastback, the Mantide is boldly futuristic.

But will anyone be able to drive it? There are plans to make two more examples, Castriota says, in white and green, to create an Italian flag with the addition of the first car. Then, in an email to the New York Times, he said: “We would not rule out producing as many as 10.” A price has also been quoted: €1,500,000

That's close to two million US dollars at the current exchange rate—almost two Veyrons worth of cold, hard cash. Not insignificant for a car built on a Corvette ZR1, which retails for 5% of the Mantide’s asking price. Let’s examine what you get for that kind of money, apart from the warm feeling of contributing to a company’s survival which has given us the Miura, the Countach and the Lancia Stratos.

Interior

While Jeremy Clarkson has named the Corvette ZR1 his car of the year for 2008 and our own road test editor Wes Siler called it “the best car ever made,” the fact remains: on the inside, it's all Corvette.

To whit, from our first drive:

In fact, the only thing detracting from the ZR1’s grand touring credentials is the interior. The only options on the $103,300 car are an awful set of chrome wheels and the 3ZR upgraded interior package, which succeeds in moving the interior from cheap and nasty into luxurious bass boat territory with more embroidered ZR1 and Corvette logos than my fragile mind could comprehend. We have a hard time accepting the “value” excuse; for this kind of money we’d no longer like to feel like a Jeff Foxworthy punchline. An automatic transmission is, thankfully, not an option.

Let’s see what the Mantide has to offer:

As you can see, it’s a modern European alcantara-carbon-fiber-leather affair, with the car’s hexagonal theme continuing as cutouts on the racing seats, themselves thin carbon shells. The instrument screen is the one used in the Ferrari FXX, the gearshift is a nice aluminum knob and it’s certainly got a snug racer feel to it. But it’s perhaps not as remarkable as the car’s exterior.

Certainly a major upgrade on the Corvette, though, but then that’s not saying much when you’re considering this is a two million dollar Italian super car.

Exterior

Here in Europe, the current Corvette is not liked much. It’s a big, brash American design, a brute amongst small European cars, but while it’s unarguably alien to these shores, I rather fancy its low, wide, flowing looks. In ZR1 trim, it’s a proper menace, with all the right vents, wings and scoops.

The Mantide gets rid of that all. Aside from the front-engined layout and the fastback silhouette, you would be hard pressed to tell there’s a Corvette underneath. And there is: the Mantide is not like the Italian-American cars from the 60s like the Iso Grifo or the De Tomaso Mangusta which paired an Italian chassis with an American V8. Beneath the red carbon fiber is a Corvette ZR1: LS9 engine, aluminum chassis, the works.

But what carbon fiber! It’s all sharp Bertone creases which turn into subtle arcs as you examine them up close, dihedral Enzo doors, smatterings of hexagons everywhere. The angular rear wheelarches—straight off the M577A armoured personnel carrier which transported the space marines into the doomed reactor core in Aliens—frame black Transformer wheels.

It’s dramatically new, so shockingly new that it’s actively disconcerting to take a few steps back and see its classic berlinetta profile. In person, it creates the sort of time warp the iPhone did when it first went on sale in the summer of 2007. You felt as though you were holding a sliver of 2011 in your hands.

The Mantide? I’d say it’s from 2017. Similar vehicles are on their way to leave the inner Solar System.

But then is it worth the price of 20 ZR1’s? There is, of course, no rational answer to such a question, as even the ZR1 is not an entirely rational purchase, being, as Dan Neil put it in his article The rapture of the hypercar, a big needle to deliver the combustible heroin of petroleum.

If you have space-faring ambitions on the public road, set to the soundtrack of a pushrod V8 with titanium bits, then by all means get in touch with Stile Bertone and put down whatever deposit they ask. The car geeks of the world need you to enable them to carry on the traditions of coachbuilding.

And then I saved the best part for the end. If you open the gigantic hood and peer inside, what you’ll see is exactly what you'll see when you open the hood of the ZR1 — a grinning, black Corvette Racing skull named Jake.

So even though this is not a race car, your Le Mans ass-kicking heritage is right there. And who could ask for more.

Photo Credit: Alex Conley (Corvette ZR1), Natalie Polgar and the author (Stile Bertone Mantide)

If you give the above photograph some careful study, you'll spot a number of items characteristically British. Those two faucets, for instance. You'll see that colonial inventions—in this case, the mixer faucet patented by the Canadian Thomas Campbell in 1880—did not always make their way back to the mother-ship, necessitating a dreary shuffle after every trip to the bathroom with two jets of water, one freezing, the other piping hot. You will also notice a copy of the first issue of Wired UK, published last week, and the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas’s radio play Under Milk Wood, a passage of which was used in perhaps the most beautiful car commercial ever made, Volkswagen’s 2007 UK spot for the Mark V Golf titled Night Driving.

Direct your gaze now to the heap of change on the tiles. The large bi-metallic coins are worth £2, have Queen Elizabeth II on the obverse and will buy you a cup of coffee and a bag of Maltesers. The reverse is unremarkable on the most common English version, but if you’re lucky, you can get one from the Isle of Man. A hilly, windswept patch of land in the Irish Sea notable for its lack of speed limits, the Tourist Trophy motorcycle race and the fact that the 1998 minting of their £2 coin has a Ferrari 250 GTO on the tails side.

If you don’t have the patience to receive it as change in the UK, you can pick one up on eBay for £8.

The MC12 hugs the tarmac like a wicked ocean predator, a flat hulking mass which eats giant squids for breakfast and orcas for snacks. It reaches all the way up to my knees and I’d love to say that I immediately see something is amiss but I do not. A twelve hour drive across the Alps and a mad dash down a twisting road has left me exhausted and this is the first MC12 I have ever seen.

I was of course expecting endurance racer looks but that diffuser could serve as the blades to a combined harvester and the rear wing looks big enough to lift a C–130. Also, I have trouble fitting my pinky finger between the car and the road. This is a race car.

You’re thinking MC12 Corsa, correct? The Maserati twin to the Ferrari FXX which sold for a cool million bucks and—like the FXX—was not a car you could actually pick up and drive home but which you adopted like a zoo animal and drove at Maserati trackdays. Yeah, but the Corsa is not street legal, so why should it be equipped with license plates? Well, plate in the singular, no way would one fit on the grille without messing with the airflow, but still.

“Hello, so what’s the deal with this car? Corsa looks and a license plate?” I ask the owner apparent, who shall remain nameless, not because of discretion but through sheer forgetfulness on my part. Let’s call him Karl!

“Oh, it’s definitely a Corsa,” Karl says.

“Yeah, but you can’t drive a Corsa on the street,” I say.

“It can be arranged,” Karl responds.

Rules, shmules! I have one last question, to which he responds:

“I took it to 223 MPH last week at the Nardò Ring. But you know how it is! You always want to go faster, faster, faster.”

He then settles into a lawn chair and lights a Marlboro. It is a spring day in Italy, after all, and well past lunchtime.

Photo Credit: Larry Parker and the author

If you were to rank extreme habitats for living organisms, the cabin of a contemporary Grand Prix racer would be right on par in harshness with deep sea hydrothermal vents, Subantarctic islands and outer space.

You are squeezed into an iron maiden of a carbon fiber tub with no padding whatsoever. The lack of suspension knocks the very phlegm off the walls of your bronchi to drown to you in your own mucus. And ever since the black art of downforce is applied to racing cars, you can expect to have several g’s of acceleration and deceleration hit your body multiple times on every lap.

It is easy to underestimate the power of g-forces. We have become so used to reading about the wild cornering capabilities of modern supercars with wings and diffusors that it takes a lap on a racetrack to drive home this fact: one g of lateral acceleration means that a force equal to the Earth’s gravity is acting on your body from a wholly unusual direction.

Experiencing it for the first time is a very humbling experience. One g of deceleration at the end of a straight results in your entire body weight hanging helplessly off a four-point racing harness as you try to control your flailing limbs to no avail. Unsecured objects fly about the cabin.

There are corners on Grand Prix circuits where a modern F1 car will generate seven g’s. It is absolutely superhuman to even remain conscious under such circumstances, let alone drive a car with utter precision in excess of 200 MPH. Corner after corner, lap after lap. And there is no cruising in an F1 car: you either stand on the throttle with all your might or you do the same on the brake pedal. It is a brutal environment to live in.

The number of people who have driven Grand Prix cars is roughly the same as the number of people who have left the Earth’s atmosphere in a space rocket. One of the former is my friend Nino Karotta, who was flown down two years ago to Bernie Ecclestone’s private track Circuit Paul Ricard in the South of France to drive the Renault R24.

This was the car that Jarno Trulli and Fernando Alonso drove in the 2004 Formula One season. Alonso would go on to become World Champion the next year with its successor, the R25. The R24 is powered by a 3-liter V10 and in an episode of Top Gear, the Stig drove it around the Top Gear Test Track in 59 seconds: a full 18 seconds quicker than the fastest road cars.

Nino was given a full day of training by the Renault team. He began his day in a 200 HP Formula Renault racer on his way to the R24. Along the way, he received training on the BATAK device—designed to boost your reaction times to things on the edge of your vision—, learned about the counterintuitive way to apply the brakes in a car producing tons of downforce and learned what said downforce does to a human neck (hint: nothing particularly pleasant).

His epic day out was made into a 20-minute TV special which is now up on YouTube with English subtitles:

Part One

Part Two

Part Three (watch his neck)

And if you’ve already consumed enough hallucinogens for the day, you can hit Google Translate and see how it copes with translating the Bohunk of his written account to something resembling English. Here’s an example:

Seven o'clock in the morning, start the track. Get a fire-resistant clothing, shoes, gloves, Balaklava (under the mask of the helmet), plugs and Smee. We are twenty, and everyone is in the size of each. Fire-resistant, wear clothes labeled comic sensation tingled. Anyway, that's clothes, and the sweat félelemszagú sloppy at the end of the day to be given only to people in return for the buzzer childhood itself.

The Australian Grand Prix begins at 5PM on Sunday, Melbourne time.

Photo Credit: CRISTINA QUICLER/AFP/Getty Images, Bryn Lennon/Getty Images

“I took this shot today, looked at it, looked again…and nothing. All I know is that the grille is from a V8 Vantage.”

The Aston Martin lands in my inbox with an embarrassing thud. I have spent hundreds of working days in my life sucking up information about cars. Yet apart from the obviously Aston grille and the lamprey-like lines, the car is a blank page. But why the words, go look for yourself:

“I don’t have a clue,” is what I reply to my friend Máté’s illustrated letter.

My reply is not exactly true. I do have the faintest of clues, not enough to base a reply on, but enough to get started. A pattern is vaguely recognized.

As readers of Malcolm Gladwell’s first second book Blink will recall, after absorbing prodigious amounts of information, the mind is able—in situations related to the nature of said information—to make quick decisions based on apparently very little input. This is how professional tennis players react to a serve too fast to interpret, how racing drivers can run competitive laps on an unfamiliar track and how an excellent friend of mine can look at a brownish spot in the sky a thousand feet away and say it’s a Black Kite. An old female, to be specific.

For some reason best left to future decades of neuroscience, cars styled by the Italian design consultancy Zagato are very easy to pattern-recognize even after limited exposure. And exposure is necessarily limited by the small number of Zagato cars on the road. One of the best known examples is Aston Martin’s DB4 GT Zagato of 1961. I have seen it exactly once, in Italy:

Zagato’s fluid yet butch lines stick to the brain like ground effect cars to the racing line. And while Máté’s Magic Mystery Aston had a whiff of Zagato about it, what it looked most like was a kit car.

Can’t be, he says. “I happened to photograph it on the most expensive street in the world,” and he directs me to the Wikipedia page of The Bishops Avenue in London.

Oh, that. The street you move to when you’ve made it, made it big, and you want the world to know about it. Zoned from a piece of land that used to belong to the Bishop of London, the Avenue has become a favorite spot of the nouveau riche, particularly if those nouveau riches have come from the likes of oil, guns and naked women. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1991, the House of Saud ruling neighboring Saudi Arabia snapped up ten of the Avenue’s 66 mansions. This is a street that used to be called Millionaire’s Mile, but which has lost that title to become Billionaire’s Boulevard. So yes, the Aston is probably real.

One of the residents of The Bishops Avenue is Hassanal Bolkiah, the Sultan of Brunei, and this is when you can sort of expect a light bulb to go off in the automotive brain—not mine, unfortunately—because you all know what Hassanal Bolkiah does with his tiny fiefdom’s oil riches: buys all the cars in the world and then some. Our very own guide to the cream of his crop will help you along with a gray F40, a Lamborghini LM002 safari wagon and five Dauer Porsches. The latter are street legal Le Mans race cars from the turbolicious Group C of the 1980s which accelerate like ballistic missiles all the way to 250 MPH.

A significant portion of Bolkiah’s fleet was not purchased but built, and alongside the Ferrari sedans and shooting brakes is a set of three Aston Martins from 1997 called the V8 Vantage Special Series I. They are based not on the current V8 Vantage but the bigger car with the same name produced in the 1990s and they look exactly like the DB4 GT Zagato of 1961, only bigger.

Apparently, the Sultan likes his supercars the 60s way. But coachbuilders are not exactly fond of reproducing earlier designs atop modern machinery. And through another flutter of Bolkiah’s bottomless wallet, the Zagato people got to work again on the V8 Vantage, operating this time not as the codex copiers of Mediaval Europe but as coachbuilders. What they came up with was the V8 Vantage Special Series II, a modern, very Zagato, thoroughly menacing Aston: the car Máté photographed.

Wicked performance is suggested by those curves and the Series II doesn’t disappoint: its 5.3-liter twin-supercharged V8 makes 600 HP and can launch the two-ton coupé to sixty in 4.4 seconds. The aerodynamic wall arrives at 205 MPH. Zagato built a total of three cars, two for Bolkiah, one for his brother Jefri.

This is where the story would normally end but just as Máté confirmed his haunch with a link to Supercars.net, Google unveiled Street View for London. I raced for a large screen, hooked it up to my Mac, and spent an hour and a half combing the length and breadth of The Bishops Lane to no avail. I found a lone Ferrari F430 but looking for custom-built Astons has a way of turning production Ferraris into Crown Victorias.

But then what did I expect? What’s the chance for a car built to thunder along motorways to sit in one place, waiting for both the Street View Opel and Máté to amble by? Before giving up entirely, Máté went for a last look. Parked on the driveway, obscured by a lamppost and fecund foliage, he found our car at last:

So on to you now, Street View ornithologists. Descend on London and dig for cars with stories. And yes, I want my photo of the TVR Cerbera Speed 12.

Photo Credit: Máté Petrány (V8 Vantage Special II), Larry Parker (DB4 GT Zagato), 2007 Tony Murray Photography/AFP/Getty Images (Toprak Mansion interior), AstonMartin.com (V8 Vantage Special I)

Wiggle your big toe. Wiggle it with enough determination and your feet, clad in racing boots, will pop into place. All snug? All buckled up? Palms not too sweaty on the balsa wood shifter knob? Good. Your toes will now serve as figureheads on a great German ship of aluminum and titanium. Now say hello to the twelve air-cooled cylinders set to turn your cabin into a furnace and blast you down the Mulsanne Straight at 246 MPH.

When the Porsche 917 debuted at the Geneva Motor Show on this day forty years ago, nobody knew it would come to define the very spirit of Porsche. The 917 gave the company its first of 15 victories at Le Mans. In four years, it morphed into the most powerful racing car ever made. Steve McQueen turned it into a movie star in his 1971 film Le Mans. But on that March day, all Porsche had was an unsorted prototype with abysmal aerodynamics. It would have died a quick death if not for the willpower of Ferdinand Piëch, who would go through similar misery to produce a car with similar perfomance thirty years later in the Bugatti Veyron.

The difference between the two is that anybody can drive the Veyron—as proven by Top Gear’s James May—but when the 917 debuted, racing drivers would’t touch it with a stick. And just consider the titanic amounts of chutzpah one needed to get into any death trap of a 60s racing car, which killed drivers with greater precision than earlier examples of German engineering killed GI’s.

The 917 wouldn’t stay on the road. Its lightweight aluminum spaceframe was barely enough to contain the immense power of the engine, an air-cooled flat twelve which began life with 580 naturally aspirated HP. Before that could happen, an engineer by the name of John Horsmann had to figure out a new tail configuration to make the car handle. These days, we have computers and wind tunnels to help, but back then, aerodynamics was Formula 1 guys sticking random wings on tall struts and Jim Hall hacking away at his Chaparrals in Texas. Horsmann’s version increased downforce at the expense of drag and the 917 Kurzheck—German for “short tail”— was born. This was the car that won the 1970 24 Hours of Le Mans, the stage for McQueen’s car nerd epic.

The 917 repeated its performance the next year before it was outlawed for 1972. Derek Bell, who would claim five victories with the 917’s successors, remembers in an article he wrote for the October 2008 issue of Octane:

Testing for the 1971 Le Mans, [Porsche chief race engineer Norbert] Singer asked me what revs I was pulling in the 917 down the Mulsanne Straight. I told him 8100rpm, which he said was a good thing because the engine would blow up at 8200rpm! That equated to 246 mph and we have never been quicker since.

The car would then cross the Atlantic to race in CanAm. With the addition of turbocharging it morphed into Moon rocket lunacy and became the Turbopanzer, also known as the 917/30, which made 1100 HP in race trim and won every race but one in the 1973 CanAm season. It retired at Talladega Superspeedway in 1975 with driver Mark Donohue—who had a week to live—taking it around the tri-oval in a 225 MPH blitz.

Yet ask people about the 917 on any side of the Atlantic and nobody remembers it anymore. Racing regulations and drivers have come and gone and Porsche has been away from Le Mans for a decade now. So why it the 917 still worth remembering? It was the last in a line of sports racers which were out to kill you, which pushed the performance envelope at the expense of safety and sanity, and when you swap your eyes with those of its driver, it still gives you a queasy, insane ride around Le Mans:

And remember: your toes, vulnerable little antennae, are in front of the front axle all the time. They get stuck in the aluminum bodywork as you wiggle for the brake pedal at the end of the Mulsanne at Mach 0.32.

Happy birthday, now, you big bad savage thing.

Photo Credit: Frank van de Velde, Porsche, edvvc

It took until last fall for Google Street View to make it across the Atlantic, a year and a half after it debuted in the US. Both roads and privacy laws are narrower here. This must have figured in the delay, but the age of Peeping Toms is now upon us. And there certainly are other things to explore than the digitally blurred faces of Italian politicians on campaign posters around the Duomo in Milan.

Some of our roads are so narrow that even seated in a Hot Wheel of a local supermini the idea of traffic coming the opposite way is enough to fill you with dread. Convex mirrors to the rescue! You can find them in most intersection, like here in the village of Cernobbio in North Italy:

Look closer and you can see the Street View car itself reflected, with its scaffolding of camera equipment balanced on top. It is a black Opel Astra, which translates to Saturn ~ in the American language.

But look even closer, move along the road, and grind your teeth in frustration at the missed opportunity. This mirror happens to be mounted at the entrance of Villa d’Este, a magnificent estate on Lake Como, site of the annual Concorso d’Eleganza. The public road Via Regina passes right next to the Villa, at one point crossing beneath in a short tunnel, and when the Concorso is on in late April, you can stop at various observation points and drool at all the cars. Since this is Italy, you can do this in the close proximity of excellent food, so that all the Maserati-induced saliva will not go to waste and will help bits of mozzarella di bufala become parts of your body.

Should you find yourself in the area this year, do swing by on the weekend of April 25-26. It’s only 15 Euro-bucks to get in and you can liquefy your brain on cars faster than it takes a Ferrari Colombo engine to rev into the high latitudes.

If you happen to arrive at the right time, you can even catch a glimpse of ladies in decadent dress, idling by a Bugatti Type 57C Voll & Ruhrbeck. As if waiting for this 1939 cabriolet to set sail not for Lake Como, but for the Southern Ocean itself.

As far as I am aware, the plot device of severing the buttocks of a live human and feeding it to others first crops up in Voltaire’s hilarious satire Candide, first published in 1759. After surviving the tsunami which leveled Lisbon, the novel’s eponymous hero meets an old woman who recounts the following tale:

“We had a very pious and humane man, who gave them a most excellent sermon on this occasion, exhorting them not to kill us all at once. ‘Cut off only one of the buttocks of each of those ladies,’ said he, ‘and you will fare extremely well; if you are under the necessity of having recourse to the same expedient again, you will find the like supply a few days hence. Heaven will approve of so charitable an action, and work your deliverance.’

“By the force of this eloquence he easily persuaded them, and all of us underwent the operation. The man applied the same balsam as they do to children after circumcision. We were all ready to give up the ghost.

Constant readers of Chuck Palahniuk’s novels would think that the practice of cutting off buttocks sat by for 246 years until the character Comrade Snarky in his 2005 novel Haunted has her buttocks cut off and fed to others—and to her. That is not so. General Motors beat Palahniuk in living up to Voltaire’s legacy when it introduced the bustle back Cadillac Seville, a car I fell in love with 24 years later.

It happened on the streets of Harlem during my last visit to the United States of America. The Seville sat comatose by the curb on St. Nicholas Avenue, at the foot of a tall brick building. I walked by at least twice every day and it showed no signs of life.

What a sad sight! The design screamed malaise louder than a Sea Stallion helicopter downed by the haboob in Operation Eagle Claw. A crude meat cleaver had fallen on its once proud buttocks and had severed everything from the rear window onward, leaving only deformed scar tissue in the shape of a bulging, proto-Bangle-esque trunk. Love took a few days to take root but it has stayed ever since, and no, this has nothing to do with the fact that around this time I was introduced for the first time to the most potent drug developed by mankind: fresh Krispy Kreme donuts.

I imagined the car polished gently to life. The wires on its crooked hubs straightened and chromed up. Its emphysemic 100 HP V8 fired up again, driving the wrong wheels, no way would it set this heavy lump of a car flying but we could start wading our way out West, eating miles all day and all night, air flowing over that misshaped butt in a gentle, coast-to-coast caress. Driving that car, letting it die a dignified death out in the desert instead of letting it slowly melt into Harlem asphalt may have been an automotive mitzvah of sorts.

The ride never happened, of course. I took the A-train out to JFK, got on a plane home, and haven’t been back to the US ever since, where my buttockless love still waits:

Someone has either driven or pushed it across the street. It is parked now by St. Nicholas Park, waiting, ever waiting for a fresh tank of gasoline which may never come. Unless I get back there somehow, armed with a dozen Krispy Kreme donuts and a hundred bucks in cash.

Photo Credit for Seville in garage: dave_7

Peter Orosz, the editor of Hyperleggera, a website he fervently claims is not a car blog (although it really is, we don't care what he says - Ed.), pens Jalopnik's newest feature dubbed "Crazy Euro Car Boy." It's a series all about one Hungarian sometimes-motoring journalist's obsession with the cult of cars.