If Jesus drove a car….
…he would have driven the Nissan GT-R into Jerusalem, not some stinking donkey.
I was an over-willing participant for a trip to Publix in a brand new GT-R. Most of it overwhelmed my feeble mind, but two moments in particular permanently etched themselves into the stone wall cave that is my brain.
The first was when we were tooling past the Jaguars stadium. As the guy who was driving was telling me about the various merits of the car we wouldn’t get to experience (like the nearly 200 mph top speed), we were quickly approaching a red light and lots of cross traffic. Since I’m 2 cool 4 skool, I didn’t say anything. Once we hit the point that I would have had to emergency brake to not skid past the light into the intersection, I pulled my best James Dean and said “Hey look, a red light.” The driver said, “Yeah, I know.” Two seconds later, and 1.75 seconds after I started apologizing to the Lord for all the bad stuff I’ve done, he hit the brakes. The GT-R hunkered down from 50 to zero in 70 feet, and when we stopped, I felt like both Dan (driver) and the car were judging me for being so skittish in a car with brake discs larger than my tires.
Second story. Like I said, we were driving to Publix to lunch. Dan was generous enough to suggest a Publix about 8 Publix’s farther away than necessary, so we got to thrash the beast on an interstate or two. Unfortunately, it was lunch and there was a ton of traffic on the roads. Once or twice, Dan was able to punch it an I was pinned back in my Sparco with a mother-of-god grin. We were in 4th gear both times. Really.
We eventually came to the Publix exit, and had to navigate one of those 35 mph hair-pin exit turns, the sort of turn in which I’ll roll down my windows, engage my hazard lights, slow down to 12 mph and pray that my tires don’t explode and send me in a death spin out of the turn.
Dan hit the entrace at 60 mph and exited at 72. I can’t say for sure, since my eyeballs don’t function at that force, but I think I saw the in-dash G meter pass 1. It was amazing!
Fortunately, by the time we got to Publix, I was less delirious and my legs and guts had solidified enough for me to walk again. Looking back at the GT-R as we walked inside, I thought “This must be what Clint Eastwood felt that time he killed all of those Mexicans.” Like I said, I was slightly delirious.