Don't tell Richard Hammond about this!
http://www.wreckedexotics.com/newphotos ... 3622.shtmlAnd I have to take issue with the idea that a Panamera is an exotic....
Anyway, reminds me of how I got into autocrossing - summer of '88, and I had borrowed Dad's Reliant while my car was in the shop. After work that day I picked up Dad at his office and he said we should go over to his friend Lee O'Briant's shop to see a wrecked Countach. Mr. O'Briant ran the Fiat/Alfa dealership in Durham, and a couple of years before a guy named Krause has joined the operation and was doing repair/restoration work for exotic cars too. When we got there, I was amazed to see a red Ferrari Daytona parked diagonally on the sidewalk outside the front door of the shop. First one I had seen in person. Dad brushed that off as "just a Fiat" and we went into the tobacco warehouse across the street to see the wrecked Lambo, which was hidden under a tarp. It had been rear-ended and the then-$5K wing had taken the worst of it.
When we came back out of the warehouse, Peter was standing next to the Daytona with a big grin on his face, and he asked if I wanted to go for a ride. I recall these things about the ride:
1) My father leaning in the driver's window and telling Peter to bring his son back alive.
2) How impossibly long the hood on that car looked from the passenger seat.
3) Blasting down Duke Street in front of my old high school at full throttle.
4) Peter apologizing that perhaps one cylinder had a misfire.
A few months later Dad and I were back at O'Briant's, and Peter let me sit in the Daytona again, and then in an 80's Testarossa. And then he told me about this event called an autocross at the fairgrounds the next Sunday.