Fun With Ferraris

All right, everybody, I’m sorry to break it to you, but that sexy car your cocaine-dealer sugar daddy bought you so you wouldn’t testify against him in his Utah trial for possession of an unlicensed firearm? Mister Speedy a has to go back to the dealer, at least for a while. Unless you want to pull a Richard Pryor.

Ferrari is recalling its 2011 458 Italia, a 4.5-liter, 8-cylinder, 7-speed, 570-horsepower, 200-mph, $230,000 penis of a car because “>it might burst into flames. Reports from the company are that the heat shield on this model was secured by cement rather than bolts, and can degrade against the exhaust system until, potentially, the cement explodes. This results in what Jalopnik (which added a “ferrari-flambe” tag this week) quotes the company as calling a “thermal incident.”

This followed a weekend of “under-the-table recalls,” called that in another Jalopnik post where they reference “at least four fires in three months,” which thermal incidents Speedlux informs me were in fact not in identical cars, but included both the Ferrari 458 Italia sports car and the Ferrari 458 Italia sedan.

If this all makes you squee, or start making jokes about “Italian mixed grill” and “wienie roasts,” or talk about how the Ferrari 458 Italia is “one hot car” or “smokin'” or how it “sizzles,” then you are a son of a bitch. It is wrong — wrong, I tell you! — to laugh at peoples’ misfortunes, especially on the highway where we’re all just meat hoping we don’t hit the grinder any time soon.

Then again, when those people are driving $230,000 cars, it sure is tempting to slap that vein and mainline a little schadenfreude, huh? Perhaps that’s the logic behind WreckedExotics.com, which collects post-incident photos of some of the most expensive cars or, rather, twisted hunks of metal that were cars before they became future 50%-recycled corrugated metal siding.

If you prefer indulging your consumer lust to delighting in the flaming misfortunes of rich people, why not build your own Ferrari? Ferrari.com lets you go interactive on its ass and configure your own Spaghetti Rocket, though if you want to detonate it you’ll need Photoshop. I don’t think they have one-click ordering yet, and neither sports car nor sedan version of the Ferrari 458 Italia are yet available for the Kindle.

Possibly related posts:

• Radiation Soars at Fukushima — to 10 Sieverts Per Hour
• San Bruno Gas Explosion Viral Media Roundup
• The Hindenburg Omen
• Bathroom Humor On the Hudson
• Carbon Nanofiber ‘Bucky Paper’ to Make Books Impregnable