The Bad: Eleven miles per gallon. Oh, and you can't have one.

The Verdict: It will be mine. Oh, yes - it will be mine.

You have to be a certain age to appreciate a car like the Ferrari 599. Oh, not just because even the smartest, most dedicated of us will have to work decades before our salaries approach the realm necessary to afford this car. There's another reason.

You have to know what sex feels like.

You don't drive this car. You dance with it. You love it, romance it along the roads, building to a crechendo in each gear. You merge together, man and machine combining into something bold, beautiful and heroic. It makes you feel like a god.

The Ferrari flows along mountain roads like liquid mercury, blasting along at speeds that astoundingly fast and incredibly controlled at the same time. Colors seem brighter, sounds seem sharper as the Ferrari's V-12 races through its range with orgasmic fury. This isn't a car, you realize. This is a state of mind.

Of course, when you're paying at least $318,045 for a car, you'd hope for a pretty transcendent experience - and not just in terms of how it handles the road. You want that baby to be perfect, inside and out. Thankfully for Ferrari (and for humankind), the 599 pulls it off. Inside, anything not covered in contrasting cowskin is made out of carbon fiber. If you're worried about damaging the leather, you may want to invest in some gloves, because the urge to touch everything in sight is hard to fight. You'll be hard-pressed to find leather smoother or softer in any wallet.

But it's more than just the quality of the interior that makes this car a gleeful place to wile away the miles - it's the styling, too. Vents jut out of the center console like afterburner nozzles on an F-15. Every control falls directly to hand, importance dictating proximity to where the driver's hands should be. Shift paddles? Right at 9 and 3, an inch away from your index finger. The button which drops the car's sequential manual gearbox into automatic mode lies down where the cupholders would be in a lesser automobile, far enough away to make you think twice about pushing it. And the radio lies concealed beneath a retractable plate, out of sight and mind. Press the plate, and it slides up like Iron Man's mask - but like that mask, any millionaires planning on on taking their new toy out for a spin would be better served keeping it closed.

Of course, no review of the 599 could be complete without mention of the marvelous manettino, the small red switch on the lower right of the steering wheel. While it might look like the sort of device used to launch missiles against Tupolev Tu-160 bombers, it in fact controls an arsenal of on-board electronic systems, from how fast the transmission swaps gears to the stiffness of the suspension. Five settings are available (although Nigel Tufnel's car goes up to 11); turn it all the way to the left, and your Ferrari is ready for driving on icy roads (ha!), whereas turning it all the way to the right disengages everything traction control, stability control and everything short of the power steering to give you the full Han Solo experience. I kept the dial in the middle position - "sport" - the whole time, and I expect most people will do the same.

As for the car's exterior, there's been plenty of discussion in the automotive world as to whether the 599 is as pretty as it could be, with some going as far as to call it "ugly." While it may not be the prettiest car on the road, it certainly has presence, and anyone who's seen it in the flesh and still calls it "ugly" could probably use a vision check or a whack upside the head.

Then again, it's probably wise to give people the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the car's appearance - they'll have to be pretty quick to catch a good look at it, given its performance figures. In their September 2008 issue, Car and Driver ran a Ferrari 599 GTB from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 3.3 seconds, and blazed the car through the quarter-mile in 11.2 seconds at 131 mph. (Interestingly, C/D mentioned in the article they thought Ferrari might have slipped the 650-horsepower engine from the Ferrari Enzo under the hood of the test car in place of the 599's specified 612-horsepower V-12, but considering every other test of the 599 - including an earlier one by C/D - displayed similar acceleration figures, it seems more likely to me that the folks at Maranello are simply understating the power figures on the 599's 6.0 liter engine out of respect for the Enzo.)

Of course, power corrupts, and in the Ferrari's case, the atmosphere ends up getting the bad end of the stick; the EPA rates the 599 at 11 miles per gallon in the city and 15 on the highway. This may be a little optimistic; Car and Driver managed to eke out only 9 miles per gallon in their comparison, and a recent test by British TV show Top Gear found the Ferrari capable of only 1.7 miles per gallon during a five-car track race. (You can see footage of the latter here.)

But in the end, it doesn't matter whether the 599's engine makes 612, 620 or 650 horsepower. Even for the folks who forked over enough money to buy a nice house and waited two years for their car, the numbers are, in the end, beside the point. The point of the Ferrari 599 is that it is, right here and now, the evolutionary peak of the automobile. No other car synthesizes state-of-the art technology with raw emotion to such magnificent effect. Should you ever trip over a thirty-pound gold nugget and wonder what to do with it, I've got a damn good suggestion for you.

The Good: Steering sharp enough to shave the electrons off an atom, an engine that'll push you through the sound barrier, looks like a sports car should.

The Bad: Brakes that make you look like you never learned how to use a clutch.

The Verdict: The perfect second car.

For some reason, people seem to always divide themselves into groups of two. White people and black people. Gay people and straight people. Dog people and cat people. And in the car world, Ferrari people and Lamborghini people.

But we all know that when you look a little closer at someone, you realize people are too complex to be divided up so simply. Barack Obama is both black and white. David Bowie is neither gay nor straight. And I, for one, love dogs and cats equally.

So why is it that we have to split ourselves up between Ferraris and Lamborghinis? Why can't we just come together and embrace both of these historic brands as producing some of the greatest cars in the world?

It's in that spirit - as neither Ferrari nor Lamborgini devotee, but a simple lover of cars great and even more great - that I stepped into the Lamborghini Gallardo Superleggera, a 523-horsepower Italian leccornia painted like a Tuscan orange. 

Well, maybe stepping into isn't really the right word. It's more like loading yourself into a massive handgun. Place yourself into the tight seat like a bullet into the chamber.  The door shuts like a magazine slamming into place, leaving you in the dark. The only light comes from the narrow gunslit of a windshield. Turn the car on and engage first gear by cocking the right-hand paddle behind the wheel. You're locked and loaded.

One you see a nice, straight patch of road ahead of you, you can finally give into your itchy toes and floor the sucker. The Lambo breaks into a run like a stallion racing for freedom, each mile per hour building on the next. All the while, the engine...oh, God, the engine. The sound it makes...it's the shriek of pure, unadulterated joy you'd make if you woke up hovering a mile above the earth - and you didn't fall. It's the sound you'd make the moment you realized you could fly.

But it's when you hit the first bend in the road that you realize the Gallardo wasn't built to drag race, but to wind along the backroads of the world far, far faster than the road's planners ever intended. It hugs the curves like your hands gliding across your lover's body, urging you to take each turn faster and faster. Mere mortals are unlikely to discover the limits of this car's handling on public roads.

Of course, scalpel-sharp handling doesn't mean dick unless you've got a responsive wheel and pedals to play with; luckily, the Lambo again makes clear that it was built for drivers with controls sensitive as those of an F-22 Raptor. (Or so I imagine; I haven't been that lucky.) The thick steering wheel, wrapped in black suede, fits as snugly in your hands as your ass fits into the black suede seats. Actually, the whole damn interior is covered in black suede; it's like the interior of the Batmobile back when Bruce Wayne was going through his "Disco Batman" phase in the '70s.

Apart from the whole swinger/vigilante vibe, the interior of the Superleggera isn't a bad place to be, at least for a couple hours. The carbon-fiber seats are supportive, but pretty short on padding; not surprising, given the diet Lamborghini put the Gallardo on so they could bestow the "superleggera" (superlight) term on it. (Lamborghini claims to have shaved 140 pounds or so off the conventional Gallardo, mostly through replacing metal with carbon fiber everywhere they could. It also gets a dandy rear wing!)   And while the steeply angled windshield and narrow windows certainly look cool from outside, you quickly come to curse them when sidling up to stoplights or trying to figure out if that Crown Vic behind you is a State Trooper or a retiree.

Sadly, not all the beefs (ha ha, get it? Beef? Because Lamborghini's logo is...a bull...and they name all their cars after...bulls...eh, screw it) are quite as minor, which brings me to the biggest thorn in this steer's hooves: the brakes. To put it delicately - they suck. That's not to say they do a bad job of slowing this beast - these carbon-ceramic discs stop this car faster than a naked Alan Greenspan will shrivel your wood - but regulating them is near impossible. A surgeon's touch is necessary to keep the brakes from clenching up charlie-horse style, which of course causes your head to yo-yo back and forth as if you were on some perverted carnival ride. Making our way through a five-car wait at the stoplight was all it took for my co-driver to fill the Superleggera with the smell of roasting brake pad. (Your humble author managed to figure it out much more quickly, but hey, maybe I was just meant to drive Lamborghinis.)

Unfortunately, the Superleggera doesn't come with a manual transmission - which would let you use the clutch to modulate speed in town - but comes standard with the six-speed "e.gear" paddle-shifting semiautomatic transmission, which creeps along all by itself when in gear just like your granddad's Buick. Now, while I'll admit the paddle shifters are easier (and safer) while driving along at high speed, until Lamborghini (and other manufacturers) can make them more liveable in town, a stick shift or slushbox is still your best bet for everyday driving.

Which brings me back to the point of this car: it isn't meant to be a daily driver. This is not a car to zip down to the mall in, it's not a car to run to Blockbuster in, and it's sure as hell the wrong car for a Costco run. That's not the point. This Lamborghini, more than almost any car on the road today, is just for kicks. It's cocaine on wheels. In this era of 600-horsepower Mercedes-Benz limousines and turbocharged Porsche SUVs, the idea of a car made just for weekend use seems more and more distant. But this Lamborghini is a blast from the past, heir primeval to the Miura and Countach of days of yore - wild, crazy cars you'd never think of taking out of the garage unless you were gonna drive the hell out of them. 

Sadly, though, this throwback has already become part of history; Lamborghini is no longer making the Gallardo Superleggera. Both it and the regular Gallardo were replaced this year with the revised Gallardo LP 560-4, which features a boost in horsepower and even cooler looks, as well as increased drivability. But don't worry - sooner or later, Lamborghini will bring out another car made just for weekends.