Well, strictly speaking, I did it with the GIMP.

This is the original shot, and it’s for an upcoming R&T piece. Now I know what you’re going to say: Aren’t you the idiot who posted the thing about how to evade cops? Well, there was no place to hide on a very long road and I wasn’t exactly driving something with the disappear-in-traffic capability of a 1990 Volkswagen Fox.

The funny thing about the McLaren 650S is this: you really get ninety-seven percent of this car’s capability in a plain-Jane C7 Corvette Z51. And although the Vette doesn’t have the raw thrust of the Macca or the dual-clutch sophistication or the crazy doors or the genuinely impressive instant-targa thing going on, it compensates with a better engine noise, a usable and pleasant seven-speed manual transmission, and better ability to handle rough roads and steep driveways and parallel parking.

I’m not going to commit the typical auto-journalist sin of being a guy who makes $45,000 a year yet blithely tells you that a $70,000 Corvette is “cheap as chips” or something like that. It’s anything but cheap. But if you can swing it now, it’s worth doing. If you can wait five years, or you have to wait five years because you can only afford a used one, you won’t be disappointed.

Spending the extra $190,000 for the 650S is only worth it if you have the money to spare, the same way a PRS Private Stock or IWC Portugese is only worth it if you have the money to spare. A Corvette or a Mexican Strat or a Seiko 5 is good enough to do what you need. But the good news is that something is currently true that wasn’t true in 1974 or 1994 or even 2004: the mass-production sports car is pretty good at doing the exotic stuff and the exotics are pretty good at doing the regular stuff.