Teenagers are dreaming about Mazdas, not McLarens. I think I know why
Supercars are everywhere today, but they don’t have the old allure, says Porter
Growing up in the 1980s, there was a solid chance that in your childhood bedroom, alongside the unsolved Rubik’s Cube and something to do with Garfield, there was at least one poster of a supercar. Probably a white Countach or a red Testarossa or both. Supercars were tremendously exciting to us kids because, compared with the everyday cars our parents drove, they seemed so exotic, like the difference between your family cat and a tiger.
If anything, supercars have got even more exotic since, what with a whole slew of 21st-century hypercars and, if Koenigsegg is to be believed, at least one megacar. At the Goodwood Festival of Speed this summer, I watched these things powering up the hill, kicking up dust with some spicy lines, getting a little squirmy under braking and generally doing their best to dazzle. When I got home, my son asked me what I’d seen. He’s 12. I began listing some of the exotic things that had sprinted past on the Duke of Richmond’s driveway, only to be stopped in my 335-width tracks: ‘Dad,’ he said, ‘I’m not really interested in hypercars.’
> Bugatti Chiron Super Sport v Rimac Nevera
Come to think of it, he’s never had any dream car posters in his room. Not of current stuff and certainly not of a Countach or Testarossa (though if he needs those, I think I still have them in a tube in the loft). But still this statement puzzled me. I began to wonder if this type of car is less special today. In the ’80s you could really only see them in magazines if you were lucky. Moving footage was much harder to come by since car telly basically meant Top Gear and in any given week it was more likely that Chris Goffey would forgo a run in a new Ferrari because he was busy reviewing the Vauxhall Belmont. Whereas today you can see multiple vids of any given car on YouTube. Maybe greater online accessibility makes these cars less mysterious and otherworldly.
I wonder if this situation was amplified by the chances of seeing a hypercar in real life. I grew up in Wilmslow, the Cheshire town that’s become synonymous with footballers and the fake-pillared, murdered-out McLaren world they inhabit. This was less extreme 40 years ago, although Wilmslow was still a preposterous place where I once spotted a 288 GTO parked at the kerb and on another occasion saw two Porsche 959s within a few minutes of each other.
But these were exceptions. On an average day, even in Wilmslow, you did not expect to see exotica on the street. Today, you do. In fact, go to the swankiest bit of any city centre or spend enough time on the main roads of Britain and you’ve a reasonable chance of passing something super or hyper. Maybe you can blame a long period of cheap borrowing or a change in attitude that says it’s okay to get into hock for a six-figure car, even when interest rates have risen. Maybe as a nation we’ve just become more prone to showing off. Maybe it’s also down to the greater number of cars available at the wedgy and expensive end of the market.
I could pontificate on this for ages, but I decided to go for the simpler option of asking my son about the reason for his indifference. ‘I dunno,’ he replied with a proto-teenage shrug before adding: ‘I just don’t like the way they look; they’re too flashy.’
This, I did not expect. But I can see the angle. A lot of modern supercars and hypercars suffer from what my podcasting colleague Jonny Smith calls ‘manosphere styling’. You’d hardly say a Countach was a restrained piece of design, especially in its later life, but it looks positively minimalist next to a Revuelto. I’m sure Ferrari and McLaren claim cars like the F80 and W1 are sculpted by the science of aerodynamics, but some of the detailing is more Myron Gaines than Murray, Gordon. The uncomfortable truth is that modern hypercars carry the whiff of Andrew Tate about them and I’m pleased that my boy is repelled by anything that stinks like the Pied Piper of terminal losers.
There is, however, one more factor at play here. My lad has started playing Forza Horizon 6, as have many of his mates, and the cars in the game are a hot topic of conversation. But the stuff they love is far from hyper or even very super, maybe because it seems more attainable in real life. He’s developed strong opinions on the best generation of Skyline GT‑R. His current dream car is an MX‑5, specifically a first-gen model because the pop-up lights are ‘sick’. His greatest wish at the end of the last school year was to be picked up at the gates in my Honda Beat because this, among his gaming peers, is a cool car.
You won’t hear any disagreement from me. I like that a 12-year-old can be interested in other things over supercars. Although, if that changes, I’m always happy to get the Countach and Testarossa posters out of the loft.
This story was first featured in evo issue 350.
