LOVIN’ THE LAMBORGHINI
Social media invite draws a crowd
The 2016 Lamborghini Aventador LP700-4 — it’s a mouthful as well as an eyeful; slung as low as a stalking panther, all sharp edges and bevelled glass, a carbon-fibre rocket wrapped around a leather cockpit.
It’s also Batman’s car of choice, which means the car resonates through generations and demographics for several reasons. Sure, it screams “I am rich” with a price tag ticking in at over $563,000, but it also fires up imaginations as surely as those 12 cylinders fire up those 700 horses. And it was those imaginations I was after, rather than those who could afford to safely tuck one in their garage at night.
I’ve said before that social media is only good if it is truly social; propping up a myth with no message is about collecting people, not interacting with them. With that in mind, I told Twitter followers, both on my account and Driving’s, that I’d be flinging those mighty bat wings up and taking people for rides. A jam-packed weekend in soaring temperatures ensued, and I was reminded that sometimes a car like this is a wonderful catalyst for connecting.
Lamborghini and I had been keeping a close eye on the weather because this roadster needs the top down (or rather, off ) for full effect. Two carbon panels, each weighing just six kilograms, come off with the release of a lever and then snap into precisely allotted grooves in the tiny forward trunk. You can’t play mix and match with the pieces and change the order, and a piece of advice I’d been given upon pickup (“you’d always cover your passenger’s head first to be polite”) stayed with me for the four days I had the car.
Up went the bat signal on Twitter, and out came the people.
In Toronto, Dan Plishka spent a full hour with the car; mostly he stared, but we finally coaxed him to sit in it. Turns out he’s a Festiva man, belonging to a club with other Festiva connoisseurs.
“Well, it’s not like my Festiva,” he announced, gazing at the Aventador. His Festiva is what my son terms a Frankenfest, assembled from parts of every other kind of car you can imagine. Dan is a car man and was happy to talk about his Festiva for an hour.
Lucas’s parents brought him as a surprise, Mike posted a pic on Twitter of the Lamborghini poster he’d had in his room as a teen and he’d brought his own son out to see the new incarnation. I had husbands and wives pondering who looked better behind the wheel. Sandy saw neighbours she’d never met before and Adrian asked his dad if he was ever going to get out so he could have a turn. Sophia drove nearly an hour for a five-minute drive in the Aventador, and declared it worthwhile. Spencer asked to park his own pride and joy — a new Mustang GT — beside the Lamborghini for a wonderful photo opportunity.
The Twitter component of this weekend circled back in a near-magical way. I heard from a reader who asked if I could surprise her neighbour with a visit with the car. She gave me his name and said, “by the way, he has nearly 10,000 followers.” Now, that is a healthy number, in fact nearly eclipsing the combined total of my account and the official Driving one. I took a peek at Jim Yarrow’s account: he’d never posted a single entry or even a header photo, yet had this host of followers. I presumed he was too famous to tweet because he sure wasn’t getting followers by posting selfies he’d taken in his bathroom mirror.
It turns out that back in 2001 he’d been diagnosed with prostate cancer at age 47. “It was by chance it was even found in a PSA test. I did that typical guy thing, getting my annual physical every five to 10 years,” he said with a chuckle.
He had surgery, but the cancer ultimately spread, and while he looks hale and healthy, he is also living with a diagnosis of advanced prostate cancer. The Twitter account? A couple of years ago, Prostate Cancer Canada asked him to pen an article on the importance of PSA testing. When the article connected well on Facebook and the PCC site, he set up a Twitter account, intending to use it as a vehicle for awareness. Time slipped by, as it does.
And then a Lamborghini showed up in his driveway. Out came the cameras, and a picture of Jim and his wife Bonnie is now at the top of his Twitter account. His first tweet was a shout out to Lamborghini and Driving for making this possible.
A friend’s son climbed up a ladder and took a spectacular shot of Jim behind the wheel. It seemed the whole neighbourhood was in the driveway that afternoon, the car the focal point for so many stories. I told Jim he had a very powerful platform at his disposal: that army of followers. A few days later, we spoke again.
“I’m going to do what I always intended,” he told me. “This has given me the nudge to get back on track and get the message out. I was only 47 when I was diagnosed; my article was called Not on My Radar.” He thanked me. He needn’t have.
It’s always about the car, but it’s never about the car.