Rex B wrote:People who are not familiar with cars like this have no idea how fast they can get away from you. Just cruising around, with a little extra pedal on occasion, is easy. But if you are slightly behind the curve, and you tip in just a little too deep leaving a stop, things just EXPLODE! Your first impulse is to to brace yourself, and for most people that means both feet clamped to the floor. Guess what's between your right foot and the floor? And then the g-forces keep you braced. Most likely this person was not prepared for what he unleashed. And he was probably tired and a little impaired.
Sometimes my current Mustang catches me off-guard. Happened Saturday, with a short window in traffic straight to an on-ramp, it overpowered the traction control and got out of shape a bit, surprised me. The lambo has over twice the power-to-weight ratio. Just because someone can afford an exotic doesn't mean he's capable of handling it.
Yeah, had that experience in late High School. I used to drag race a '67 Chevelle SS 396 (375 hp) and also periodically raced my brother-in-law's ''68 Road Runner with a 426 Hemi (425 hp). These were hot cars, but heavy, but could get away from you very fast if not careful.
I had a friend who was a Doctor's kid and only child. He and daddy decided they wanted a race car and had a 1973 Camero built with a balanced and blueprinted 396 equipped with a Weiand tunnel ram supercharger on it. When they got the car they drove it a little and just dogged it around town for a couple of weeks.
Because of my (slight) racing experience my friend wanted me to take him out and see what kind of power it had. Not being real familiar with it, but being used to fairly high performance cars, I ran it through the quarter a couple of times pretty hard, but nowhere near letting it totally lose.
My friend got behind the wheel again. I advised that even though we were on a drag strip, for him to take it easy until he got used to it and take it in baby steps to see what it would do and to get the feel. Well, needless to say, he decided that he wasn't gonna let me drive his car better than him and got on it pretty hard out of the hole. He did OK until he shifted to second. When he dumped the clutch after shifting he got a little overzealous, put his foot into the throttle and the extra power caused the back end to break lose. He panicked, lost control and we ended up spinning about 2 revolutions around and barely missed the outside spectator wall. He got it stopped, I looked over and the blood had drained from his face. I kinda laughed a little, but then could tell he was really scared. He got out of the car and almost fell down because his knees were weak. He said he had driven enough for the day and we loaded it up on the trailer and hauled it back to their storage.
We talked about it on the drive back and I told him that he just needed to take it easier and learn how to handle it. We unloaded the car at the storage building and left. That was on a Sunday afternoon. On Monday I found out he had already put the word out through the people that built it to find someone that wanted to buy it and he never drove it again.
Long story short, you take a super high performance car like a Lamborghini, put someone behind the wheel that has never driven anything with that kind of power, add a little machismo and show-off-man-ship and it is a recipe for disaster.
