The first supercar I ever drove in anger remains the car of my dreams. I vividly remember my stomach flipping and my pulse quickening as a bright yellow spaceship barked and snuffled its way out of the factory doors in Sant’Agate, Italy. It was the fastest production car you could buy, the Lamborghini Diablo GT. Only 83 were made and I had one to play with for a day on Lamborghini’s famous test track — Tuscany.
Capable of 211mph, it had a 6 litre 12-cylinder engine with 575 horses and a price tag just short of £200,000. But what made the GT really special was that it marked the end of an era for supercars, and especially Lamborghini. You could see it in the eyes of the mechanics and even the chain-smoking PR man. This was the last hand-built Lamborghini before the company was absorbed into the Volkswagen mega-corp.
In those days supercars weren’t built with ladies in mind. You needed to be a gymnast to get into the thing, the ride was rock hard, the clutch was heavy, the gearshift tough, and drivers would quickly learn to abandon it in the street rather than park it.
Height-wise the Diablo barely reached my ribcage but was twice as wide, with enough vents, scoops, bulges and wings to make a Harrier jump jet look dull. Driving it through a Tuscan town was enough to turn you into a gibbering wreck.
To drive it was also physically demanding and required your absolute attention all the time those massive alloys were turning. One sneeze at the wrong millisecond and a passing lorry could be redecorated with bits of carbon fibre and V12. It was a car that demanded to be pushed to its limits and it sulked if it wasn’t.
Today supercars are very different, and ladies, you have nothing to fear. My mother, for example, wouldn’t have been able to jump in and drive off in a GT but she was able to manage that feat in the more modern and user-friendly Murciélago at a racing circuit last year. Supercars have changed, in some respects beyond recognition.
Take, for example, the Bugatti Veyron. It is the world’s fastest road car and would leave the Lambo for dust. But to drive it is as docile as a puppy. Granted, the driver doesn’t have great visibility and it drinks the fuel. But in every other respect you could take this car to the supermarket. Think of that. It has a 16-cylinder engine with 1001bhp that whacks out more power than a Formula One car. It weighs two tons, has four turbos, seven gears, will hit 62mph in 2.5sec, 180mph in a little over 14sec and won’t stop until it says hello and goodbye to 250mph. Yet there’s no reason you couldn’t load it up with the weekly shop.
By contrast the GT didn’t have a rear-view mirror, or even a boot. There were no gimmicky wheel-mounted gear paddles, either, and certainly no driver aids. Perish the thought. Sometimes evolution is a very good thing.
The trend towards woman-friendly supercars was started by the helpful Japanese, who didn’t have the patience or the physical stature to wrestle with macho machines the Italians were pumping out. Their vision was to build something as fast as a Lamborghini but as easy to drive as a Honda Civic. The headline-grabbing NSX, honed by none other than Ayrton Senna, was “the most driveable supercar ever”. It not only flattered the skills of the world’s worst drivers but it was also fairly affordable, costing around £50,000 at launch.
In fact it was so easy to drive, and so reliable, you didn’t need a second car let alone AA membership. It was an exotic-looking machine with everyday practicality — you could fit a suitcase into its boot without leaving the spare tyre at home, you could cruise comfortably (and quietly) on motorways, the clutch was light so you wouldn’t mind the odd jam, and visibility was decent enough for you not to make a hash of parallel parking.
Since the days of the NSX the game has moved on yet again. In the early 1990s, 270bhp was a significant amount of power but today you can buy a hot hatch with as much. In 2006, your supercar doesn’t come with anything less than 500bhp — Lamborghini Murciélago, Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren, Koenigsegg CCR, Pagani Zonda . . .
These machines now boast such serious figures that they require serious concentration, but they’re bursting with driver aids to help keep them on the tarmac. You could drive the Merc SLR to the moon and back and it wouldn’t miss a beat while cosseting you like a S-class with electric seats, air-conditioning, automatic gearbox, cruise control and the like.
Having said all that there is a modern supercar that acts like an “old” supercar in terms of being temperamental and badly behaved. I’m referring to the Aston Martin Vanquish S, which broke down on me twice while I was attempting to hit its claimed top speed of 200mph plus.
With a film crew recording the events for Five’s Fifth Gear show, I slid into the hot seat, fired the 6 litre V12 into action, popped it into first gear, put some left-hand lock on and gave it a welly-load of throttle. As I gave a cheeky wink to the camera the only thing to fly off was the drive belt. Not quite the tyre-screeching, tail-sliding action we were expecting.
I do this manoeuvre every day in my £27,000 Honda S2000, but for some reason Aston’s £177,000 Vanquish S threw a hissy fit. And so in flew the Aston Martin maintenance squad.
Yes, two professional spanner-men were dispatched to my rescue in a helicopter. Now that’s what I call service. If I’d had a similar experience in an MGF I’d still be on a breakdown truck.
Aston’s overall-clad chaps diagnosed a “random stone” had hit the belt, so they put it back on and departed skywards. And so, cameras rolling, I repeated my own take-off, only for the problem to repeat itself. Random stone my . . .
Back came the chopper, and this time we all deduced that the car simply wasn’t designed to be driven like that — the engine was actually twisting in the bay and throwing the belt as I powered away on full lock. I’ve done it in Ferraris, Lambos, Porsches and, heaven forbid, even TVRs without there being a problem.
Those sort of mechanical problems are the exception rather than the rule nowadays. That said, my heart still belongs to the one creation that puts driver skill ahead of driver aids. The Diablo GT; for me still the best supercar.
THE MOST PRACTICAL SUPERCARS
Porsche 911
It’s not programmed to break down
McLaren F1
It has three seats
Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder
Trust me, with the roof down it can transport anything
Maserati Quattroporte
It’s got four doors
Lotus Carlton
Four doors, five seats, big boot. Any more practical and it would be a bus
