“Fastest Car”, Netflix

I love car shows.

I’ll binge watch Top Gear. I’ll hit Grand Tour the day the episode posts. I’ll watch nearly every episode of a car or bike builder show.

So I was plodding around Netflix and stumbled onto “Fastest Car”. The premise is simple, throw a random three cars up against a super car in a drag race, and at the end, take all the winners and race. Meantime, load up with idiocy and drama. The Real Housewives of drag racing.

First, there’s this random matching. The last episode before the final race sported:

• An extra cab diesel pickup
• A Mazda RX-2
• A ancient Datsun, powered by a homegrown electric setup
• And a Lamborghini.

This one was especially funny, since the Datsun lost it, hit the Mazda, spooking the woman in the Lambo, allowing the stupid pickup to win.

There’s a reason cars are classed in racing. Just like boxing, you don’t pick a fight out of your weight class. Pick the top supercars, pick the top of each class, then go at it. And really, they should have either limited it to those that raced, or picked drivers. The first place to start would be a race stats from a drag strip. 90% of the show could have been done with math.

Second, Speed is just a question of money. How fast do you want to go? For the most part, a lot of the cars that raced were hopeless. You really think you’re going to take a junkyard 80’s Cutlass and in a few weeks with little money beat anything? I think that guy DNRed (did not race), as did the dude in the supra, Because he couldn’t keep his car running. The supercars are purpose built for speed and endurance. They are expensive for a reason. Sure, the owners didn’t put “blood, sweat, and tears” into their cars, but a team of engineers and craftsman certainly did. Interestingly, the dude that came in second was in a T-Bird he custom built to race – because he races. It was stripped of everything not needed to race and still be road legal.

Third, every non-supercar that was anywhere near competitive used Nitrous (NO2). NO2 is the steroid of racing. That’s like me juicing up, then snorting coke and saying I’m a premier athlete. If your car can’t be competitive without NO2, it’s by definition not the fastest car.

Lastly, their definition of “sleeper” is a little wide, to say the least. Very few of the non-supercars were sleepers. If a car is sitting stupid on bad suspension work, with oversized tires, a hole in the hood with a scoop or other BS sticking out, and a sound like a garbage truck with a missing muffler, it’s not a sleeper. You know all what that dude is about.

Awhile back I was tooling along a huge tollway in north Texas on my way home and I had a bit of a race pass me. I heard it before I saw it. A custom corvette, weaving down the highway way to fast, with what turned out to be a BMW 328 on his ass. Let that sink in. A custom chunk of american pig iron couldn’t outrace a 2.8 liter beemer.

Or a bike. My last bike was a Yamaha FZ-1. It would go 0-140 in seconds with my fat ass on board. For all the street race bravado, I’ve never seen one of these guys beat a bike. They’ve always wound up in my rearview, far behind.

After a few episodes, it descended into farce, and was really just stupid. At that point it was worth it just to see it end, even though you knew the supercars and the pro racers would win and place.