Men's Journal

A 530-hp Lamborghini Gallardo and a 490-hp Ferrari F430 are two fifths of the Supercar Life stable.

Want to learn how to drive fast in about $1 million worth of exotics? Class is in session.

by Eddie Alterman

Two shiny black semis sit parked in the pits of Fontana’s California Speedway, disgorging five matched pairs of the finest cars available. Two-by-two they go, like the offloading of Jay Leno’s Ark: Ferrari F430s, Lamborghinis Gallardos, Mercedes-Benz CLK63 AMG Black Serieses, Porsches 911 Turbos, and Aston Martin DB9s. They are here at this otherwise empty racing complex for the delectation of a no more than 15 lucky souls, who are about to experience the mother of all test-drives. It’s a new combination driving school/track day called Supercar Life.

For $5700, Supercar Life gives you a whole day to rag on someone else’s exotic cars, on a track. It’s a roving program, moving around the country to various tracks. (There will be about 40 events this year.) Included in the price is a stay in a luxury hotel, five-star food, and hot women hired to treat you like a Roman emperor.

Coaching me from the passenger seats will be accomplished race car drivers and instructors, guys who’ve kept their foot in it through Turn One at Indy and whose gaze remains as steely as Charles Bronson’s while you saw at the steering wheel. This education from top guns is what sets Supercar Life apart from similar programs touting time spent behind the wheel of rarefied vehicles. It’s one thing to give a man access to 2,440 horsepower’s worth of machinery and another to teach him how to wring the best performance out of it with only a few hours of experience. In fact, that’s a large reason why Supercar Life came to be.

In 2003, Jan Otto crashed his $456,000 Porsche Carrera GT into an oak tree. “I figured I needed instruction for that level of car,” he says, showing me the scar on his tanned and moisturized chin. So he founded Supercar Life. Otto splits his life between a ranch in Wyoming and Pittsburgh, having recently sold his Monaco digs. His job is “to sell expensive stuff to wealthy people,” and he understands them because he is one. That said, you don’t have to be Warren Buffett to imagine that fast cars, racetracks, and pretty women in short shorts makes a good business model.

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The program begins at 9 am with breakfast and a little chalk talk. In one of the speedway’s meeting rooms, Mark Hamilton-Peters, racer of vintage cars and one of six instructors on hand, works the dry-erase board like a high-school physics teacher. He draws a picture of a seesaw with a car on it, and shows how the vehicle’s mass moves around when you brake and accelerate. He draws the course’s layout, telling us where to position on corners, and how to separate the tasks of braking, turning, and accelerating, which are to be done in that order, and never in combination. Mixed in with the fundamentals are paradox-of-speed koans, such as “Enter a turn slowly to exit quickly,” and “Don’t aim at the Porta-Potty, or you’ll hit it” — the notion being that wherever you’re looking with your eyes is where your hands will naturally steer the car.

In our short sleeves and gym shoes, we walk out of the classroom and through the paddock in an imagined slo-mo shot, looking like pudgier versions of those dudes in The Right Stuff. We’re about to strap in for Round One — a slalom course and a 0-to-60-to-0-mph run, which will get us familar with each car’s abilities. Otto has arranged the cars in a performance hierarchy so that we start with the less sporty Aston and work up to the fission-powered Ferrari. Along the way we experience every supercar ouevre: engine in the front, in the back, and in the middle; flat-6, V-8, V-10, and V-12 powerplants, both turbocharged and normally aspirated; rear-wheel drive and all-wheel drive. Speed fetishists, this is your Amsterdam.

These preliminary exercises are almost over before they begin, but I do manage to lock up the brakes in the Lambo, kick the tail out on the CLK Black, and make 40 seconds of sweet, sweet love to the Ferrari.

“Now for Round Two,” says Hamilton-Peters. All ten cars are lined up in two rows, and the lovely ladies of Supercar Life are holding open the passenger doors for us. First we’ll ride with the instructors for three laps, then we’ll jump into the driver’s seat of a matching car to follow them around the track. If all goes according to plan, we’ll get faster and faster with every lap, learning the proper racing line, including where to brake, turn in, and hit the gas.

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My first chariot is the Aston DB9, a heavy grand tourer that is more unwilling to change direction than a charging rhino. The instructor in the passenger seat explains why and kindly offers a solution: “There’s a big V-12 in the nose,” he half-shouts, “so you want to brake hard to get the front end to bite into a turn.” Not only does that make sense — braking shoves the car’s weight forward, giving the front tires more traction for cornering — but it even works. That said, listening to, processing, and applying the shouted-out wisdom of passengers while whipping two tons of metal around at triple-digit speeds isn’t always easy

My next ride is a Porsche Turbo, and lordy, is it magical. It twitters nervously as I plow through the infield, its perfectly weighted steering vibrating in my hands. The brakes are big enough to stop time, and the instructor urges me to use them to their fullest. He points to a set of cones on the banked oval and says, “This first cone is where other cars would be braking. You can brake between the second and the third.” I hammer the pedal and nearly leave my dental records in the dashboard.

Next up is the CLK63 AMG Black Series, which is impossible to tame. The tail swings wide as I dab in too much gas through the infield’s first three corners, leaving behind a burnt offering of tires to the speed gods. In the pits my instructor tells me that I’ve got to be patient with this bruiser, to wait until the car is pointed in the right direction before squeezing on the power. I nod my helmet.

Now I get to taste the Italian stuff. The Lamborghini is rustic and heavy. Its mid-mounted V-10 wails all the way up to its 8000-rpm redline but delivers thick gobs of torque any time my right foot asks. Because of that, the instructor tells me to keep it in third through the twisties. Only when I get it on the banked, oval part of the track do I need to shift. I’ve hit 130 before I even have a chance to look at the speedometer. Then I attack the infield and let the car’s all-wheel-drive system compensate for my lack of talent.

Finally, my dream, the Ferrari F430. For all its machismo, this car is a hummingbird: agile, fast, and fluid. When I bomb up onto the banked bowl, it feels almost magnetically attracted to the pavement. At 150 mph, I can’t tell which is breathing more heavily, the Ferrari’s V-8 or me.

Then it’s back to the paddocks, my track time over. Stepping from the F430 I’m greeted by a splashing sound, and I look over to see a fellow Supercar Lifer ralphing on his shoes. He wipes his mouth and gives me a thumbs-up that says. Another happy customer.

This article originally appeared in the November 2008 issue of Men’s Journal.

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