The Mille Miglia is a transcendent and transformative experience. When you are driving down a narrow road on top a ridge in Tuscany, with valleys stretching below on either side and the smell of the farms on the air coming into the car it’s easy to forget city traffic jams and overheating 65 year old cars.
Take any Lamborghini Huracán to the track and have a blast, But with the Huracán Performante, you can have one that’s already set the Nürburgring track record for a production car at 6:52:01. That means it took down the previous record holder, the Porsche 918 Spyder by about five seconds. The gauntlet has been thrown down, and now the $274,390 price tag for the Huracán Performante looks even more enticing.
The Levante takes its name from a warm Mediterranean wind. Maserati must get credit for successfully transferring its design language to the SUV form. There doesn’t appear to be a straight line anywhere on the body, just plenty of elegant curves and no attempt to look truckish. Squint, and you can see a bit of Infiniti’s SUV designs here and there, and the mini fender vents still look a bit Buick-ish to some.
Usually, we hold our Texas event in November, when it’s still warm and sunny but there’s not much going on in the rest of the U.S. vintage car world. This year, knowing that the famous Hill Country spring wild flowers would be especially brilliant thanks to El Nino winter rains, we scheduled our Texas Bluebonnets for April 3 through April 8.
The Corvette long carried a stigma of crudeness versus the Europeans, and the Chevy bowtie just doesn’t carry the status of a Porsche crest. That reputation had been eroding since the late 1990s, though not everyone noticed. Today, any Porsche 911 driver not looking at the new Stingray with just a twinge of horsepower envy ought to check his pulse.