Dream drives: This car changed my life
Lockdown makes one dream of past glories. Here are four of my all-time favourite cars to drive.
Subaru Impreza WRX
Now look, I know you’re going to think me an awful bogan, suspect that I wear baseball caps backwards and my pants way down low, and perhaps even imagine that I prefer to take money out of an ATM by ramming into it at high speed, but it can’t be helped. I love Subaru’s police-baiting Impreza WRX and I always have, even when it looked like a duck being ridden by a fish.
That’s because, in a way, it changed my life. Back in the mid 1990s, while working as a “serious” journalist on The Canberra Times, I offered to review motorbikes on the side because I thought it was a tremendous lark. It’s fair to say I found cars so boring and lame as
to be beneath contempt, but the motoring editor clearly saw some benefit in proving me wrong and lent me a WRX for the weekend.
I can still remember the crisp, clear morning when I fired that incredible missile at some of my favourite riding roads, and how much the experience rattled and enthused me. Could a car actually offer thrills as intensely visceral as a bike? No, of course not, but this was a different kind of fun, one that might not kill me.
Over the years I would return many times to the WRX – one of the great performance bargains of all time, which kept its price at a staggeringly low $39,990 for years – and even when the design department gave it a front end so ugly that you had to make sure to approach it only from the rear, I still found something to love about its simple, grip-and-rip approach to tearing bendy roads apart. Incredibly, you can still buy one today (from $45,652). I really must drive it again.
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Porsche 911
While the WRX story might cast my old boss in a generous light, it should be pointed out that he would go on to torment me for years by dangling the keys to various Porsches in front of me, even taking me for drives in several stunning 911s, yet never letting me behind the wheel. “You’re not ready,” he would insist, dourly, clearly enjoying my frothing rage. “One day, you’ll see what I’m talking about. Best. Car. Ever.”
It’s rare in life that a much-touted experience meets expectations, but driving a Porsche 911 (from $241,200) really does. I’ve loved every one I’ve had the pleasure to steer, even the tiny, pre-traction-control ones that want to kill you, and it’s that steering, in particular, that makes me go dewy-eyed. And somehow, every time they make a new one it manages to be better than the one before. It’s like someone improving on chocolate. Or sex.
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Ferrari 488 GTB
When people accuse me of having a great job I point out that much of it involves sitting in dark rooms suffering Powerpoint presentations about seat cushions and cup holders. Eventually I admit that the good days are, it’s true, very good. And one of the best was the day I was fortunate enough to pick up a spectacular Ferrari 488 GTB from the factory where it was made in Italy and send it soaring through a mountain pass along some of my favourite roads in the world.
The 488 ($469,888 when you could buy it new here; now second hand only) was a huge step up in power and terrifying speed, but it’s not actually better than the car it replaced, the 458, which carried the last of Ferrari’s non-turbocharged V8s and made a sound that transcended mere engineering to become truly orgasmic.
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KTM X-Bow
Every now and then you discover a car that seems to have been built with just you in mind, and for me it is the KTM X-Bow ($189,990) – a unique attempt to apply the minimalism of motorcycling to the four-wheeled world. Built by Austrian company KTM, it puts the engine from an Audi S3 into something that weighs about as much as a bath, and offers similar protection from wind, rain and rocks flicked up by cars in front of you. It really is as close as you can get to driving a motorcycle – and thus I felt like this spectacularly savage and visceral vehicle brought my entire driving history full circle.
I almost spun it full circle several times as well, because included on the long list of things it doesn’t have – a windscreen, a stereo, seats you’d want to sit on – is any form of electronic driver aid. Your right foot is the traction control, and mine had entirely forgotten how that works. It really is like driving a racing car on public roads, right down to the fact that you can actually see your tyres, and thus place them exactly where you want them in a corner.
I loved driving this mad X-Bow, partly because it reminded me of what it’s like to feel so close to death that you feel truly alive, which is what I miss about motorcycling – and the reason I switched to cars.