There is a road in northern Germany whose credentials are unlike any other. The A31 wends north of Bottrop toward the Dutch border in what every road atlas of the area charts in an entirely unspectacular manner. The information these maps don't share is that besides causing all vehicles from the area to have license plates stamped with the amusing prefix BOT, it's also home to a company called Brabus. And for the past twenty years, the A31 is where Brabus has tested its own perverse take on the fast sedan.
Locating this road has proved problematic in the past, but the Lambo's complicated navigation system somehow picks the correct exit, and we head north. All's good. Before it very quickly turns bad. It happens so fast: the narrow lanes, the truck, the hideous shriek of composite meeting steel, the sudden bout of nausea. The homicidal urge to follow that truck driver to the ends of the earth and wreak furious vengeance on him and his mullet. Then residual highway noise in the distance and me standing over the passenger side of a stationary LP640 that is now missing a chunk of carbon fiber from one of its vestigial cooling pits.
The lanes had narrowed to the point that the Lambo's hips were straddling both lines, as were the truck's. Stuck alongside him, I gunned the car in second, and just at the moment I was praying for him not to wobble, the bastard wobbled. Truck wheels loomed big in the windows and I flinched, sending Barry's backside into the temporary steel guardrail to the left. I hate myself for flinching. I hate that trucker. But I hate damaging something so wonderful even more. Screw Germany. I won't bat an eyelid if I never see the place again.The damage is cosmetic, so we join the golf-cart-sized road once again, and I pucker up for what will be the most unpleasant fifteen miles of driving in my life.
Relief comes. The A31 is busier than I remember, but that soon changes on account of this road's unique feature. It goes nowhere. The A31 simply comes to an end in the middle of somewhere, and this is the key to its importance as a test route. Change direction, and this is a highway with no exit for six miles southbound: all you have to do is wait for a gap big enough and you have your own 200-mph proving facility. Funded by the taxpayers. We're running fast northward when Barry points out that the nav system seems to think we're traveling in a field at 175 mph. The road appears ominously fresh and new. Jesus H: the road that went nowhere found somewhere to go. I can't believe it. We crashed to reach this place, and it no longer exists. So we clock 205 mph a few times and leave, never to return.
So this is the state of play. The two humans are dejected souls: the photographer on account of the murky German sunlight and the driver because he has the spilled blood of a Murcilago on his hands. But the third member, the one that was thumped into the guardrail and is being driven at enhanced speed toward Cologne and then Frankfurt, is completely unfazed. Oh, and just in case it isn't already clear, I hate Germany. ...next page >>