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A Lost World: 1960s Afghanistan, the Photos of Bill Podlich

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ObserverArt1/23/2014 6:00:50 am PST

re: #143 Rev_Arthur_Belling

How f-ing stupid is that. I almost wish some of these supercars had age limits on purchase and driving. Those are not cars to be played with. Thankfully, nobody was injured or killed because of a man-child’s stupidity.

I’m not sure if it is still in effect, but at a time in auto racing you had to work your way up in smaller classes of cars until the FIA granted you a super license. A super license allowed you to go to the high-powered stuff to race. And if you were incompetent or a danger to others on the track, they would pull your license.

Many car buffs (me!) think something similar should be done with road cars. Just because you can plunk down the big bucks for something with over 500 hp doesn’t mean you should be able to take to the streets in it. There should be performance testing facilities where you have to go through high-performance driving school.

I remember a bad accident here in Columbus when the third generation of the Dodge Viper came out, two brothers too one for a test drive (luckily without the sales rep). They made a turn onto this one road and got on the gas real hard. The car fishtailed and the back end went into a culvert and when they came back out the car launched airborne into an on coming car killing the people in the other car ( I think 2 people, memory fades).

The two brothers turned into complete snakes after they both came out of the hospital with head injuries. One claimed the other was driving and neither would admit it saying they had head injuries and amnesia. I do believe the jury went with who the salesman said was driving when they left the car lot and hit him pretty hard with vehicular manslaughter and a maximum sentence set by law. It really pissed of a lot of car people. Many local car buffs discussed the super license idea after that.

Now ther are even more cars that have extreme performance. Need we talk about some of the fantastic Porsche accidents that have claimed some Hollywood types.