In the movie Le Mans, Steve McQueen's character states that "Racing is life. Everything else . . . it's just waiting." I'm not saying he's wrong, but I'd also like to point out that pulling a 168-minute "double stint" in a relatively heavy race car with no power steering at Watkins Glen has a way of sucking all of the pleasantries out of my conversation. And that's probably why I got a little snippy with my friend and fellow racer, editor-at-large Sam Smith, during the drive home from that race at the Glen this past Sunday.

I was in the middle of complaining about a new restaurant in Washington, DC where you have to pay $250 a plate before they even let you see the menu, when Sam cut in and said, "Yeah, yeah, it's the Gilded Age all over again, blah blah blah. What's there to say about it?"

"Quite . . . a . . . BIT!" I sputtered, squeezing the steering wheel of our Acura TLX hard enough to make it wander out of the lane a bit and start beeping frantically. "There is . . . quite a bit to say!" I'm not personally comfortable with the fact that the small towns of the Midwest are filled with unemployed, deeply traumatized young veterans of our overseas misadventures while the Washington power brokers who profited from those misadventures are cheerfully waiting in line every night to spend a thousand bucks on dinner for two couples. I've been gainfully and proudly self-employed for most of my adult life, and I'm no socialist in the mode of Eugene Debs or even Bernie Sanders, but I've read enough history to know what happens to a country or an empire when the middle class descends into poverty while the rich degrade into mere gluttony.

It's for that reason that I find myself feeling sick to my stomach whenever I read some automotive journalist gloating and gushing about this or that quarter-million-dollar supercar—even when the journalist in question is me. I'm starting to wonder if we should attach a Surgeon-General-style disclosure notice to every test or article we do concerning a car that is financially out of reach for all but the very wealthiest driver. It would go something like this: "WARNING: Many supercars tend to be purchased by people who got rich doing things that would shock and horrify you."

Not that every supercar owner is an Enron executive or swaggering Wall Street bonus baby.

Not that every supercar owner is an Enron executive or swaggering Wall Street bonus baby. I have a friend who is a highly competent and sought-after cancer specialist; he owns a Ford GT, a Gallardo, a 458 Italia, and all the other usual suspects. I don't think anybody who has ever had their life saved by his intervention would begrudge him those cars. A few years ago, my three-year-old son complained of leg pain. He had some scary-looking spots on his femur X-ray. My friend took a quick look at them and reassured me that it wasn't likely cancer. As far as I'm concerned, he can have all the supercars he wants and I'll never feel a moment's worth of resentment. But let's be honest with ourselves, however; the people who are clogging up supercar dealerships nowadays are not all spectacularly-talented doctors.

In the year 2016, there's no longer much of a Horatio Alger path to supercar ownership. I went to high school with a kid whose father owned two very successful tire stores and who bought himself a 512BBi with the proceeds. I never knew of anybody who got a bad deal at those tire stores. They were just profitable, and the guy socked away ten or twenty grand a year until he had his Ferrari money saved up. Now here's the crazy thing: when he was ready, he just went to the dealer and bought a 512BBi. He didn't have to buy a used Ferrari first, he didn't have to go through an application process, he didn't have to play that Catch-22 game where you have to be a valued Ferrari customer to get your hands on the good stuff. He just went to the dealer, wrote the check, and drove the car home.

Naturally, he had no end of mechanical trouble with his Berlinetta Boxer. Today's supercars are so much better than their predecessors that there ought to be a new word to describe them. The Lamborghini Aventador SV resembles a Miura in the same way that the F-22 Raptor resembles a Piper Super Cub. Not only is the modern Ferrari, Lamborghini, or McLaren able to out-accelerate a Suzuki GSX-R motorcycle while returning better fuel economy than a '96 F-150 short-bed, it's also remarkably reliable and usable. You can take a Huracan to the grocery store in 110-degree weather but you can also expect it to start on a freezing winter day.

I want to believe that all of the waiting-list and preferred-customer hysteria is a direct consequence of the significant improvements in today's supercars. Yet I know in my heart that's not the case. We live in a world where the rich keep getting richer, and that is why the demand for everything from Bentley Mulsannes to Pagani Huayras is at record levels. It's a world where Mazda's decision to produce another generation of Miata virtually amounts to charity because the pool of prospective middle-class buyers keeps shrinking but Bugatti can raise the price of the Chiron to $2.5 million and nobody bats an eyelash.

The worst part about this, speaking as a dyed-in-the-wool automotive enthusiast, is that this economic stratification produces less involving supercars than we'd have otherwise. I'll explain. If the middle-class economy can't sustain sales of great enthusiast cars like the Miata and the Mustang, then the chances of young people being exposed to those cars in their parents' garages or the used-car lots of their neighborhoods declines. So even if those young people eventually have the means to buy a supercar, they won't have any idea of what a real performance car should be.

The reason you can't get a stick shift on a Ferrari nowadays has nothing to do with Formula One.

In other words, the reason you can't get a stick shift on a Ferrari nowadays has nothing to do with Formula One. I say it's because the average self-made Ferrari owner has never operated a stick shift in his life. He was never exposed to stick-shift cars, because there's no longer enough money floating around the middle class for everybody's dad to have an MG or a Miata as a third car. He has no real idea how to drive a fast car. So his supercar has to cater to that incompetence.

No wonder, then, that the Autopilot-equipped Tesla P90D is the new darling of today's Gilded Age buyers. It's the ultimate prestige car for somebody who can't drive worth a damn and has no interest in learning how to drive worth a damn. You can say what you want about the people who bought 1976 Porsche 930 Turbos, and a lot of what you could say would have the word "cocaine" somewhere in it, but you can't say that any idiot could drive the thing in a hurry. The same was true for the Ferrari F40 and the two-wheel-drive Gallardos. Hell, it was true about the original Mercedes 300SL, in a very big way.

The only bright spot I can find in all of this is the same bright spot that Edward Gibbon found in the decline and fall of the Roman Empire; it eventually led to a more enlightened and democratic era. In the meantime, it's perhaps best to view modern supercars the way we've come to view the ancient ziggurats of South America. Appreciate their beauty, marvel at their construction, stand in awe of their geometric perfection, but never forget that the men who stood at their apices weren't shy about shedding blood.

Born in Brooklyn but banished to Ohio, Jack Baruth has won races on four different kinds of bicycles and in seven different kinds of cars. Everything he writes should probably come with a trigger warning. His column, Avoidable Contact, runs twice a week.

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