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Your retinas may be reeling from the visual assault of the blinding yellow Ferrari Scuderia Spider 16M, but that optical barrage doesn't pack half the wallop this Italian inflicts on your cochlea. There is nothing graceful, respectful, or restrained about the Ferrari's exhaust note. In response to any quick stab of the aluminum accelerator pedal, the engine-control computer tells valves in the exhaust to bypass the mufflers. I call those baffles valvole di vaffanculo, because to open them is to raise an acoustic middle finger to anyone within earshot. (Valvole in Italian means valve. Vaffanculo, if you have never watched The Sopranos, is Italy's favorite NC-17 way of telling you to go fly a kite.) Luckily, the 503 rambunctious horses under the glass cover provide sufficient thrust to make the car disappear in an invisible cloud of hydrocarbons before anyone has the chance to flip the bird back at you.

The AMG Driving Academy at the Nürburgring is a trifecta of automotive scholarly brilliance: there are cars and then there are AMGs; there are tracks and then there's the Nürburgring, and there are schools, and then there's the AMG Driving Academy. But I'm not yet aware of this as my shuttle picks me up from the Frankfurt airport. As we get closer to the famed 'Ring, Porsche after tuned Porsche drives by in the other direction, a gaggle of Nissan Skylines buzz past us, wastegates whistling. An old bi-plane flies by, doing loop-de-loops in the sky above us into the sunset. I smile as I realize that I'm at Ground Zero in the promised land of engine-powered mayhem.