You know how it is. It’s your one day off this week and you have to spend it at the used car lot because your junker ’89 Ford Festiva got rod knock after you used it to try and break the sound barrier. The salesman clocks you for a land speed record enthusiast and slaps the roof of the 1997 ThrustSSC jet car. “This baby right here broke all manner of records back in the Clinton administration,” he says. “Did about 763 miles per hour in October of ’97, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. That’s a speed that ain’t yet been beat. Real beauty. Only one owner, and he just used it to tear across the Black Road Desert in Nevada at speeds incomprehensible to the common man. Not a lot of city miles on it.”

The point is, the world’s fastest car is less of a car and more what you’d call a sideways space shuttle on wheels. Just look at the thing. It looks like what the X-Men would show up in to save a kid from intolerance. It’s a car the same way that a vodka Red Bull is a soft drink. It has never, not once, yielded to pedestrians.