Does More Money Equal Worse Driving?

It seems we can’t get through a news week without having our eyes assailed with a picture of some rich specimen whose totalled his priceless supercar. Not long ago it was the prize tool who will go down in the history books as the one who destroyed the first ever Nissan GT-R — and on a test drive no less — and this week it’s a guy in Chengsha City China who mutilated his rare Lamborghini Murcielago LP640 while showing off and attempting to flick the rear out around a corner.

I know of course that the media is going to pay a lot more attention when a half million dollar piece of exotica is wrecked than for instance if you hit a telegraph pole in your Daewoo Nubira, though it doesn’t stop me from wondering if when your wallet size and ego increase, your driving skill decreases substantially.

The old adage “Pride comes before a fall” always springs into mind when I think about this because it always seems to be the case of a overpaid executive trying to impress the commoners on the street with his flamboyant driving skills when things seem to all go wrong.

And whenever I read a story like this, I always feel that smug emotion creep up insde my brain and begin to laugh internally at how much of an idiot you’d have to be to do something like that, but in reality if I had the bankroll to splash out on a Ferrari F430, Nissan GT-R or whatever, would I be any different? Could I possibly have been in exactly the same situation as the Chinese guy who just turned his LP640 into an expensive paperweight?

In reality, I don’t think there’s one of us alive who wouldn’t want to show their car off if they owned something like that. Hell, I know a guy who own an R31 Skyline and he prances around in it like it was a Bugatti Veyron – and most of us in this scene are the same, whether you like to admit it or not. Some of us might not be as adept in the art of showboating as others, but the fact remains we all love to flaunt what we’ve got.

In retrospect, I do think that an increased wallet does decrease driving skill slightly, simply based on the wank-factor of the car you own. The fact of the matter is, the better the car you own, the higher your likelihood to want to show it off, and the higher the likelihood you’re going to do something stupid – like wrecking a GT-R on a test drive, or something.

- Leon.