Okay, nobody won the war on drugs. But if you loved cars, the pop-culture collateral damage from the War on Drugs paid off. The me-first Eighties were in the midst of a sweaty love affair with cocaine, a doomed romance that inspired one of the all-time great examples of period television. Whatever else Miami Vice was—music video, fashion showcase, traditional bad-cop story under pastel lights—it was the first show to parade the modern supercar across American TV. Through it, a generation was introduced to Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and all manner of lust objects that they otherwise wouldn't have been seen. For many, the cars were why they watched.

Decades on, it's easy to view the show's undercover cops and flash as mere period camp. But Vice, the work of showrunner Michael Mann—he later found prominence directing films like Heat and Collateral—was an honest attempt to capture an authentically bizarre time and place. Eighties Miami was a drug-fueled combination of greed, unspendable wealth, and unsurpassed carnality. Today's faster-bigger-louder supercar culture came of age under pink and blue neon.

It's also why, in the year of the show's 30th anniversary, we wound up on Miami's Rickenbacker Causeway, focused not on the sparkling ocean or swaying palm trees but on the 1988 Lamborghini Countach we were pushing onto the shoulder. This time, we hoped it was merely out of gas.

In late September of 1984, TV audiences witnessed two suspiciously stylish police officers blasting along Miami's bridges and causeways at night. Sparks flew from the undercarriage of their Ferrari Daytona Spyder, the city reflected in its long hood, as an ominous rock anthem punctuated the men's conflicted heroism. Or something like that. More important, the show's opening montage let its stars brood on their double lives in what looked like one of the most beautiful Ferraris ever built.

Miami Vice was partially inspired by the Florida police policy of using confiscated evidence to finance law-enforcement operations (and, more commonly, overtime pay). Some Miami cops in the Eighties really did drive Ferraris and other exotics, though not always honorably; often, it was just because they were corrupt. Edna Buchanan, a crime reporter who won a Pulitzer for her coverage of South Florida during that era, says that one entire graduating class of Miami's police academy wound up dead or in jail.

"It was a strikingly weird time," she told me. "Miami has always been a smuggler town, but with cocaine, the amount of money involved made people insane. The criminals often went from poverty to incredible wealth on one deal—and some of these guys had been hiding out in the mountains of Colombia a couple months beforehand. The cops ripped off the criminals, and everyone had too much money. Once they got it, their first stop was the jewelry store. The second was the car dealership."

Buchanan recalls a large number of single-car accidents in those days involving "fancy foreign cars," and it's easy to imagine them being cocaine-related. Coke made things weird for the obvious reason—it's an astoundingly effective stimulant—but also because a dime-sized amount sold for $100 in 1982. In South Florida, the stuff was literally falling from the sky. Homestead Police Chief Curt Ivy was addressing a poolside meeting of a neighborhood crime watch when a 75-pound bale of coke fell from a plane and into the gathering. Buchanan, whose apartment was within spitting distance of the Miami River, one of the drug trade's main highways, was often kept awake at night by the sound of powerboats racing up and down the waterway.

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Vice emulated a world stranger than fiction. Similarly, the cars weren't always what they seemed. As much as the cops were actors, the guns were props, and at least some of the white stuff was talcum, the show's Ferrari Daytona was a replica. Because TV repli-cars are rarely built with a sense of justice, it was based on an Eighties Corvette. (A real Daytona Spyder made a brief appearance in the show's pilot.)

As a teenager, I watched Miami Vice from the get-go. Between the cars and the surprisingly good music, I was hooked. Alex Núñez, Road & Track's web director, grew up at the same time, in the same cold latitudes, and he went to college in Miami partly because of what he saw on the small screen. ("Sunlight, girls in bikinis, cars, girls in bikinis.") Senior Editor Josh Condon had no particular connection to the subject, but he loves wearing sunglasses and deconstructed blazers with the sleeves rolled up. Happy bonus: With his shaved head, he looks like the heavy in a waterfront deal gone bad.

All of us wanted to pay tribute to Vice by visiting Miami and doing the kind of driving done on the show (though no car chases, sadly). This meant spirited cruising across the city's many bridges, down its palm-lined boulevards, and past its art-deco buildings and high-rises, all while looking good and contemplating into the middle distance. So we found a 1971 Daytona, along with a 1986 Testarossa like that one that detectives James "Sonny" Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs (Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas, respectively) drove in the show's run. We also located an '88 Countach, because cars like it were favored by multiple Vice villains. Then we headed into their natural environment looking for a little danger of our own.

Unsurprisingly, Josh chose to drive the Countach—the coolest and most evil-looking car of the bunch—first. The 455-hp Lambo's very name is an exclamation (it roughly translates to "holy sh**!" in Piedmontese), its longevity a testament to outrage, its design a cartoon. There are strakes and scoops here that its designer, Marcello Gandini, never intended, along with an ungainly U.S.-spec bumper and that infamous wing.

Next to the flowing lines of Seventies Lamborghinis, it's easy to see the late Countach as an aging celebrity reinvented too many times. But with perspective, it seems one of the more soulful things of the era—a Lionel Richie type, trying to keep pace by piling on glitz. Also like Lionel Richie, it pretty much pulled it off.

Josh swiveled in through the Lambo's flamboyant doors. Moments later, he wiggled out when it wouldn't start. Ten minutes after that, following a jump start from our photographer's van, we were off. Cue synthesizer.

THAT THE LAMBORGHINI MOVES AT ALL IS SECONDARY TO THE IMAGE IT SEARS ON YOUR EYEBALLS. HOW COULD YOU CALL THAT A DISAPPOINTMENT?

Ninety seconds after that, the Countach ran out of gas. Unlike modern cars, whose low-fuel lights give you around 50 miles warning, the Lambo's gives you around 50 feet. Our first foray into Miami involved fetching a gas can, then watching Josh as he coaxed the giant-tired, heavy-clutched Lambo off the median's wet grass. Our second Miami experience, less than two miles down the road, was pushing the thing a hundred yards to the Shell station after it ran out of gas yet again. (That 5.2-liter V-12 apparently needs a certain minimum in the tank to maintain fuel pressure.) Fittingly, one of Miami's finest pulled up behind us in a cruiser and hit his rollers. But he was just making sure everything was safe, taking off once the Lamborghini was parked at the pump.

"I think I used most of the extra gas getting this thing off the shoulder," Josh said, clambering out from under the car's towering scissor door.

"I bet you used most of your adrenaline when that cop came up behind you," I said.

"Cop?" Josh said. "What cop?"

He wasn't kidding. You can't see out of the Countach. Rear visibility is so laughably nonexistent that our car's owner used the rearview mirror to store maintenance notes. The door mirrors give you a great view of the engine's jet-fighter air intakes and nothing else. If more than a license-plate-size section of window would roll down, you'd drive with your head sticking out just to see who was in the next lane. As it was, we made sure there was always a passenger along to act as lookout, because bad visibility is a Countach fact of life.

It gets worse. By design, the seats are permanently reclined. The top of the steeply raked windshield is inches from your face, and the sun visors—tiny, checkbook-sized pieces of vinyl—stabbed all of us in the forehead. They were working as expected; this would have happened when the car was brand-new. Folding them down obscured perhaps a third of the forward view, which, again, is the only view you have.

It should be noted that this particular car, due to a planning hiccup, wasn't in the best mechanical shape. The steering wheel was 30 degrees off-center, the tires were bald, the brakes pulled to the right, and the clutch never seemed to work the same way twice. But this is the Lambo's chief lesson—that laundry list never mattered. Not in Miami, not to us, and not to the three-deep crowds that formed, asking to sit in the car, whenever you park. (Trying to get back to the Countach after stopping for a café cubano in South Beach, I was accused of elbowing my way to the front for a better look.) And even when gawkers see you dangling the keys, they only let you through once you've promised that every kid for a half-mile can have her picture taken behind the wheel. We were happy to do this, mostly because we're nice guys, but also because it was refreshing to see someone who fit in the thing.

There's a good car here, somewhere beneath all the bad visibility and ridiculous compromise. The engine makes impressive noises; the comically fat tires tramline but deliver honest-to-goodness steering feel and feedback; the gated shifter clunks into place predictably; and you get a sense that, all things being equal, a Countach would be a fun car to drive.

WITH THE MONEY AND THE CHEMICALS, THESE CARS START TO MAKE SENSE. AS DOES A SHOW THAT CONDEMNED THE COKE TRADE WHILE PLAYING WITH ITS BEST TOYS.

Just not in traffic. On bridges and boulevards you go into survival mode, wrestling the wheel back into line over pavement seams, asking nervous questions of your passenger. The side windows are so low you can't see over Miami's bridge railings, which means you can't take in the gorgeous view. As a bad-guy vehicle, this would be pretty much the worst choice possible. You could run, but there's no hiding this car—and that's assuming you even knew the cops were behind you. You get the feeling that, back in the day, Lamborghinis spent a lot of time gathering dust in the drug-cartel motor pool.

But we're hardly calling this a disappointment. How could you? That the car moves at all is secondary to the image it sears on your eyeballs.

The Daytona is a classic in its own right, and it didn't need a stylized cop show to pad its legend. During the second Cannonball Run, in 1971, a completely stock Daytona coupe famously made it across the country in just 36 hours with Brock Yates and Dan Gurney at the wheel. The Daytona's strong but simple design might seem undramatic, especially next to the Countach (or any another Ferrari), but the roar from its front-mounted, 4.4-liter, 405-hp V-12 is magnificent, transcendent, and bestial. It's the sound of an ape screwing an angel, and at high revs, it almost sounds consensual.

In the Eighties, cars like this were part of the first vintage-car boom. Right or wrong, a Daytona became a symbol of people who were trying to buy class. It just so happens that some of those people wiped their noses a lot and talked too fast.

We had to fill the battery on the Daytona, which seemed to need a constant diet of distilled water, but otherwise, the car required no extra attention. Aside from the thirsty battery and an inability to idle—a result of our example's lumpy cams and competition tune, which made it unhappy at low revs and a beast with nine rows of teeth at high rpm—there were no special instructions. Which meant it was gobs more fun to drive around Miami than the Lambo.

Of the three cars, the Daytona gives the best view out, and nothing disturbs it. It has the straight-line unflappability of a snowbelt plow truck, so if you're not moving the ponderous shifter through the gears while working the heavy clutch, it cruises beautifully. (A nice case of forearm pump tells you the car is set up to maximize stability for those top-speed, transcontinental runs.) Blasting down Miami's many straights, it's a fiendish joy; when you're turning, the car's just a fiend.

Not that it's some sort of Maranello dragster. Miami doesn't hold many curves, but the Daytona carved up the few we found with composure and precision, demanding nothing except every last bit of our arm strength. We would rather have driven it in just about any other environment, but over the bridges and down the causeway, you're a prince of the universe.

"This might be the most Italian car I've ever driven," Alex said during his stint at the wheel. "It's such an angry, hard-assed thing, but so lovely. It plays right into the stereotype. It's one of the reasons for the stereotype, I know, but the reality is really something. And this car's just more real than those other two."

And in this group, it's somehow the understated one. We drove the Daytona in unhurried calm, the crunches of our dislocating shoulders drowned out by its sonorous wail. Still, an undercover cop driving this? Ludicrous.

Between the money and chemically induced insanity, these cars start to make sense. Covering the Countach's lovely lines with aircraft doodads and putting huge cheese-grater strakes down the side of a perfectly good Ferrari might seem logical if you're looking at the world through a haze of white powder. As does the decision to make a cop show that condemned the coke trade while brazenly playing with its best toys.

Insane or not, it wouldn't be a drive through Miami without cruising past the neon-lit art-deco hotels on South Beach's famous Ocean Drive. It's a touristy thing to visit these three- and five-story hotels, most of which are across a traffic-clogged street from a broad expanse of white beach. But 30 years ago, these architectural gems were rotting from the inside out. Yet more odd dividends from the drug war: When Vice shot here, the production team restored and repainted whole buildings. The show inspired tourism, and the engine of South Beach business chugged and caught. It's now roaring again, and visitors' dollars have helped preserve and revive the area.

It's a wonderful sight, at least from the beach side of the street, to see the blend of late Gulf light and early evening neon wash across the façades. Across the road, aggressive restaurant greeters will grab your elbow, toss you into a chair, and throw an overpriced margarita down your throat before you can blink, all while yammering their spiel at every passerby. I hope I haven't implied that cocaine is completely gone from this city.

Gliding along Ocean Drive in the Testarossa, I'm actually relaxed. The car is well preserved and glitch-free, which helps. But there's more than that. This is a good car by any standard, not just in comparison with lesser cars of the era. The Testarossa was the least nimble of our three (we're extrapolating in the Lambo's case) but it was also solid, with medium-heavy steering, right-now throttle response, decent power, and a quiet rumble from the mid-mounted, 5.0-liter, 390-hp flat-12. In the best Eighties tradition, the high-mounted side mirrors look goofy, but they work. Well, the driver's-side one does, at least.

IT WAS A STRIKINGLY WEIRD TIME. WITH COCAINE, THE MONEY MADE PEOPLE INSANE. THEIR FIRST STOP WAS THE JEWELRY STORE. THE SECOND WAS THE CAR DEALERSHIP."

The Testarossa was also the only car here we found relaxing at speed. It has the classic Ferrari off-center pedals and straight-arm steering, so you find yourself in an upright, alert driving position that demands your attention. But it also boasts that clack-clack gated shifter, which makes up for a lot. Then you put your foot into it, and the engine that's subdued at low speed rises to its full height, blasting you forward with a surge of smooth, deliberate power. It's a sensation unlike anything you experience in the Lamborghini or the Daytona, and the whole amazing archipelagic city jumps eagerly toward you.

Enzo Ferrari famously said that aerodynamics were for people who couldn't build engines. You have to wonder if his company felt the same way about the pharmaceutical fads of the Eighties. Someone certainly saw which way the wind was blowing; the crazy mirrors and sharp edges on the Testarossa's flanks are a nod to that fleeting, jittery vibe. But the car's engine and chassis were designed with forever in mind.

"I want one of these," I said at some point, either before or after Josh and Alex said the same thing. "It'd have to be maintained by someone else, but I very much want one. The Eighties did not live in vain."

Given the right meteorological and social climate, you could live with a Testarossa. There may be no better cruising-over-bridges hardtop in the world.

While doing just that, the car's twelve thrumming behind me, I hit a bit of a trance. For the first time since we came to this bewildering town, I was just driving, letting the neon wash over me. And I thought, yes, in a crazier time, I could see myself wearing a tangerine blazer, sitting in this car outside the home of an arms dealer played by a young Bruce Willis, waiting on a terrorist played by a young Liam Neeson, hoping to catch them in the act of a complex, three-way, drugs-for-weapons deal as Jan Hammer music played in the background.

Such thoughts brought home to me, for about the hundredth time during that trip, the possibility that Miami Vice wasn't that great of a show. Especially now that we've had programs like The Wire and Breaking Bad, masterful pieces of drama that double as much better fictional insights into what drugs are and what they really do to people and societies. But social insight wasn't why America watched Vice, and besides, the only signature car that came from either of those shows was a Pontiac Aztek.

Credit where it's due: Miami Vice introduced us to a lot of good actors and era-defining music and let us see these cars in motion. It was a show for its time.

And what a strange time that was. Thirty years down the road, it all runs together: the Testarossa's side strakes, the pastel clothes, the synthesizers, the Countach's wing. Bales of cash, powerboats, and a weird criminal glamour that still resonates.

It makes no sense, but it happened. I mean, what were these people on?

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