Classic My Favorite Ride: Hey Lamborghini, I'm still waiting for my test drive
Editor's note: Laura Lane is enjoying a much deserved break this week so we reached deep into the well of past My Favorite Ride columns for this installment. This one was first published near the end of December 2013. It seems like a fitting time to ask again, "Does anyone want to drop a Lamborghini off with a car columnist for a week?"
Today I offer unsolicited advice to New York Times writer Dwight Garner: Stick to reviewing books, please. And thanks, by the way, for recommending Janet Malcolm’s “Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial.”
It’s not that Garner cannot write well about cars; he has a way with words, although his stories are a bit heavy on the metaphors. In the midst of shredding up last Sunday’s newspaper to stuff some boxes for late holiday shipping, I came across Garner’s Dec. 20 “Behind the Wheel” column about a 2013 Lamborghini Aventador LP 700-4 Roadster.
White. Sleek. Fancy upon fancy. V-12 engine with 691 horsepower. Zero to 60 mph in less than three seconds. Blue flames out the exhaust pipes! Half a million bucks.
Garner describes this futuristic car as a “growling alien insect.” He claims he has never cared much about what car he drives, mentioning rusted-out Jeeps and Volvos. (Sorry Dwight, I’ve got you beat: road-weary mini vans and several wrecked Subaru station wagons.) He claims to dislike flashiness.
And yet, when Lamborghini chief operating officer Michael Lock delivered an Aventador to Garner’s New Jersey driveway two months ago, he was happy to take the ignition key (wait, there is no key; just a push-button starter) and agreed to drive the car for five days. “Here’s an itch, I recall thinking, I could get used to scratching,” Garner wrote.
Yeah, me too. Except it’s so unlikely anyone from Lamborghini will find their way to my house in the woods to deliver me an Italian luxury sportscar that Car and Driver magazine named “the best Lamborghini ever” to drive for a week. My long gravel driveway alone would prohibit this from ever happening.
Garner described how the car was the hit of Halloween night in his neighborhood. He was beside himself with excitement arriving at his daughter’s school to pick her up after a biology class detention and soaring home along western New Jersey roads. “At the tap of the gas pedal, the landscape turned into a smear.” The car’s top speed is 217 mph; he claims to have not come close.
I know just what he’s talking about. Except that my Lamborghini driving experience came from a passenger’s perspective. When I was behind the wheel, the lime-green car was parked. There’s a picture of me, driver’s side door flipped up, legs out the door, feet crossed. I am smiling, having just returned from a 15-minute chauffeured and very fast drive on the back roads of Orange County. Every curve my driver Keith Burton flew around, I prayed there was no horse-drawn Amish buggy straddling the center line. When I screamed, from sheer exhilaration, Burton told me to hang on, and we took another sweeping curve without braking.
Rick Rechter's collection: Lamborghini a favorite for one 9-year-old
I have driven quite a few amazing cars in my 13 years writing this column — and been a passenger in others. When I think about my favorite rides, the Lamborghini of July 2007 is right up there with a 2005 trip down Freeman Road with Andy Minnick in a 1951 Chrysler Windsor without brakes.
And to Mr. Garner: I hold no grudge, but I am jealous. They trusted a middle-aged Volvo-driving man who reviews books for a living with a $488,175 car for five days. All I got was strapped into the passenger seat of a 2007 lime green Lamborghini Gallardo convertible that cost about $200,000 new.
I will be keeping an eye out the front window at home to see what appears.
Got a story to tell about a car or truck? Call 812-331-4362 or send an email to llane@heraldt.com.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: Car columnist still waiting for Lamborghini test drive 10 years later
