Protocol 3: Protect the Pilot

Till All Are One

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It’s what non-car people don’t get. They see all cars as just a ton and a half, two tons of wires, glass, metal, and rubber, and that’s all they see. People like you or I know we have an unshakable belief that cars are living entities… You can develop a relationship with a car and that’s what non-car people don’t get… When something has foibles and won’t handle properly, that gives it a particularly human quality because it makes mistakes, and that’s how you can build a relationship with a car that other people won’t get.

“We are an endangered species, you and I. We lovers of speed. We devotees of power, performance and noise.
“Go away”, we are told, “and take your carbon-fibre and your fire-spitting V12s with you”.
There’s hardly a place out here for us anymore, not amongst all the commuters and congestion. Not in this growing age of safety and restraint, where practicality trumps adrenalin. Where the ratio of miles to the gallon is championed over horsepower to the weight.
The evidence is everywhere. You and I are being squeezed out, pushed aside and hunted down at every hairpin turn.
And yet there is hope. There is a safe haven, a place where we are free to challenge conventions, push the laws of physics and drive our powerful, our beautiful machines hard.
It’s not a racetrack in Germany or even a highway in Montana. It’s not even a real place, actually. It’s more than that. It’s a communal celebration of horsepower, torque, grip, leather, technology, beauty. It is the last bastion of automotive lust and it’s right there, in your living room.”

"What it makes me feel, though, is sad. I just can't help thinking that, thanks to all sorts of things...cars like this will soon be consigned to the history books. I just have this horrible, dreadful feeling that what I'm driving here is an ending."


-- Jeremy Clarkson