Next we hopped into the Gallardo. This is not the top of the line Lamborghini. There are currently 2 models and the top one, the Murcielago, costs 300 grand instead of 200 grand, and it goes 0-60 in 3.8 seconds instead of the gallardo’s 4.1 seconds. I was supposed to drive the Murcielago, but someone on the tour the day before spun it around and hopped a curb, damaging 2 wheels and some other minor stuff. The owner said it would probably only cost 10 grand to fix it! But he assured me that the smaller, lighter Gallardo with the 520 HP Audi 10 cylinder engine is every bit as fun to drive as the more expensive 12 cylinder big brother. Personally, I think he was lying, and I do regret that I didn’t get to drive the fanciest super car these guys own. Like the Ferrari F430 however, this Gallardo scared me, and with the top down it was much louder. When we drove it under overpasses, it roared with a loud reverberation just like a motorcycle.

 

Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder

The 5th car was a spur of the moment decision. I had never planned to drive the Vette that day. I changed my mind after 2 of the instructors insisted that it is the fastest car they have. Indeed it has 500 HP and a 0-60 time of 3.7 seconds. This is so much more than a standard Corvette! It is as fast as the Ferrari yet less than half the price. Of course, there are reasons for that. It really is just a common corvette inside and out, except it is stuffed with a huge insane motor.

 

Someone else had hopped into the Porsche 911 Turbo that I wanted next, so I decided to test drive the cheapest supercar money can buy. I was looking forward to the fact that it was a manual tranny with a real clutch pedal – a rarity among these cars here and the only manual I would drive that day. This brings me to the one major opinion change I left with that day, which really surprised me. Paddle-shifting cars are mandatory on a super car if you want to maximize the performance of them. I have owned far more manual shift cars than automatics, and I have always preferred them. A paddle-shift car is not really an automatic though. It is closer to a manual, in that the driver has full control of when to shift each gear up and down. Still, I thought I was a purist and that removing the clutch pedal and not using a stick to shift was the lazy man’s version – a sort of semi-automatic. On regular sports cars up to the power level of my M3, I still prefer a full manual shifter, but once I drove this corvette Z06, I immediately noticed how much time it took to depress the clutch, get off the gas slightly, shift the gear with my right hand, and let the clutch out. Now I am a pretty good shifter and I didn’t miss any gears, but I just couldn’t make this Vette accelerate as fast as the Ferrari did. The time you are in first gear is less time than the shift takes from first to second! You have to shift lightning fast and even a seasoned owner familiar with the manual is not going to be consistent every time. Also, on a paddle-shift car you keep the gas firmly pressed on the floor the whole time, and you never remove any hands from the steering wheel with each shift, which gives you more control. Even better are downshifts, where the computer gives the perfect blip of the throttle to perfectly double clutch the gears in one smooth motion that no human could ever match. The Vette was still a blast, and I loved shifting it, but I felt right away that if I were on a race track the guy driving the paddle-shift car would win. Hmm, no wonder Formula one cars use them! On a slower car like my M3, I am sure I can keep up with the slower revving engine. I still prefer my 6 speed manual to an SMG paddle-shifting M3.

 

So how did I like the Vette? My first impression was that it was oldschool compared to the other cars so far. It was just as fast as the Ferrari and Lamborghini, and so much faster than my M3, but for the first time I drove a super car that I wouldn’t trade for my M3. At the time I told my friend that it was more fun to drive than my M3, because of the brute power, and it was. However, brute power isn’t everything. The interior didn’t even try to escape its low budget General Motors look and feel. The dash looked like a rental car compared to my BMW.

 

 

Corvette Z06