For speed, there are no excuses. There are no corners that can be cut, there are no “easy ways”, and there is no “cheap and cheerful.” It demands pioneers who are not afraid to push boundaries all the way to the middle of next century, and then some. It requires and engineer’s precision and an artist’s eye. It is a relentless quest to break the barrier of what was thought possible. It is bravery, it is emotion and it is an art form in itself. This is what it means to build a supercar, cars that are able to bend your mind while bending your entire face. To the unsuspecting, they are just expensive toys for rich men to show off. But they are so much more than meets the eye; each supercar is an ultimate culmination of artistic metallurgy and the most groundbreaking technologies; it would not be an exaggeration to say that they are the proving grounds of the future of the automobile. Behind the showroom glass, these loud, fast speed and dream machines have inspired generations. Supercars have long ago ascended to a level that is above being just some fast cars, no, they have literally changed the world.
Even the first real “supercar”, the Lamborghini Miura of 1966, gave a wakeup call for the entire automotive industry. Its powerful 3.9 liter V12 engine was mounted transversely in the middle of the body, the first for any car. The frame of the car itself was a steel honeycomb monoqoque structure, which made the car to be relatively light while still being rigid. 50 years ago, this was an advanced piece of engineering, but now, a monoqoque frame is a commonplace in the automotive world. It was wonderfully executed, and better yet, it was beautifully executed, captivating and mesmerizing anyone who had the chance to see its curves and smooth lines while listening to its engine sing bewitching melodies. The Miura’s production ended decades ago, but its formula is still followed religiously in supercars of today: technology, beauty, power and speed.
So what? Naysayers will sneer, aren’t they just expensive toys for rich douchebags? Not quite. For generations, these machines have inspired thousands of young boys who watched with awe on the other side of the dealership glass. Every boy and ambitious young man had a poster pinup of a Lamborghini or a Ferrari on his wall. These cars have been motivation, a dream, a goal which drove us to work harder and become a better person so that maybe one day we might be able to have one of these amazing pieces of engineering on our driveway. These great, fanatical machines represent the human ability to look at an amazing achievement and still go, “No, it can be better.” In the 80’s, cars like the Ferrari F40 and the Porsche 959 were thought to be the ultimate in automotive engineering, everybody thought that cars could not be any faster or any more advanced. Boy were they wrong. Both the F40 and the 959 have been blitzed by their modern descendants, but not only are the modern offerings faster, but they are much safer and much, much more refined to drive on the roads in everyday conditions.
The biggest factor of admiration that fans have for supercars, though, is not just how pretty it looks or how fast it goes, but how much and how often they break our minds. It doesn’t take that much reading to find that these cars involve technologies that are staggering difficult to comprehend if at all for an average intelligence of you and I. Cars like the Ferrari F40 were getting their bodies molded out of carbon fiber some ten, twenty years before us mere mortals would be able to afford carbon fiber fabrics. The 2005 Porsche Carrera GT had its clutch and brakes made from a material called silicon carbide, the hardest material known to man, a material that is also used as nuclear fuel. The three fastest production supercars of our generation; the Ferrari LaFerrari, Porsche 918 Spyder and the McLaren P1 completely transformed the way people thought about hybrid technology by using it as a car-equivalent of steroids while everybody else made dull compact cars. And with stunning new supercars like the Aston Martin-Red Bull 001 and fully-electric Rimac Concept One being unveiled by the month, we can all be rest assured that the automotive tech fest among the fast and the furious isn’t going to slow down anytime soon.
We humans have always had that thirst to be faster, to be better. They were inspired by our desire to be the best that we can be, and they in turn inspire others to be the best that they can be. Perhaps we love supercars not because they’re fast or expensive, but because they represent the 9 year-old in all of us, who felt like the king of the world and made the world so much more awesome with our hare-brained fantasies. They are the ultimate celebration of human achievement, the greatest expression of our dreams, and they are keep getting faster and better as we speak. When we look at the Miura today, and compared it to its great grandson, the Aventador, we see that some of the highest regarded scholars and intellectual minds were wrong about humanity. We are not stumbling backwards, we are still speeding forwards.
