Oh, this is a story that is really painful to report. The Porsche Carrera GT is an incredibly rare, incredibly beautiful and incredibly powerful supercar.
It has a 5.7L V10 power plant, a six-speed transmission, does 0-60mph in 3.6 seconds and is based on Le Mans racing technology. It will set you back £330,000.
It is undoubtedly where this half of the Brits on Pole team would invest our automotive cash should we ever gain access to really stupid amounts of money – if supercars haven’t been banned by then and all of us forced to drive Renault Clios or ride bikes.
And, if you want to see pictures of one of just 1,270 that were made after it’s taken a battering from Anthony Hamilton – in our Hertfordshire neighbourhood – then click here and here. (warning: NSFW doesn’t begin to describe it, in our opinion.)
Mr Hamilton is reported to be shocked and embarrassed – but unharmed.
Other facts you might find interesting include these: he reportedly stuck it through a hedge close to a children’s play area 200 metres from his home (no-one else was involved in the accident). And the car is not his – it was borrowed for the day and he refuses to say who it belongs to although the plate looks German to us. He also says it is his first crash in nearly 30 years
Personally we’re still boggling at the pictures of the car.
Prize for top quotes goes to The Mirror who has rounded up a passing tree surgeon, Daniel Winn, 23: “I was working near his house and saw him leave in the Porsche. He started revving the car really hard and wheel-spinned off.
“He had the roof down and looked at me before he put his foot down. He roared off and 50 yards down the road lost it on the corner. The car spun around at 180 degrees and left the road.” Read full story here.
This is illuminating because the Porsche Carrera GT is well-known for being rather hard to handle if over-revved. We thought the circumstances of this accident sounded a bit familiar, so we applied to Google for answers and to have our memories prompted.
And we found this – a horribly prescient sentence from Jeremy Clarkson’s uncharacteristically reverent review: “You’re told, before you set off, that in no circumstances should you apply any throttle at all while engaging the clutch. The mountain of torque, apparently, would catapult you and your £320,000 hypercar into the nearest piece of foliage.
“The Porsche engineers talk about the clutch pedal as though it’s the trigger for a nuclear bomb. It may as well be.”
The lesson we take away from this incident is as follows. If you’re going to play with fancy motors, for Christ’s sake do a bit of research first…