Outrageous cars like this Liberty Walk BMW M4 are enough to make your grandpa’s monocle fall out in disbelief, but building this stuff is actually not so much a rebellion as a biological imperative. We need mad behavior like this; it’s what pushes mankind forward…
It’s a massive ballache to drive.” A strong opener here from Andrew Britton, as he climbs out of his extravagantly bootylicious M4. But the fact that he’s saying this with a huge grin on his face tells you all you need to know about human nature in the twenty-first century. We don’t like to make things easy for ourselves.
Consider the fundamental psychology of mankind. Primitive humans lived in caves, munching on freshly wounded furry mammals, and basically only had four things to fill their days – the so-called ‘four Fs’: feeding, fighting, fleeing and, er, mating. To survive, we needed to find things to eat. We needed to fend off any creatures that wanted to eat us, or had come to take our food away. We needed to be able to run like billy-o from things that we weren’t strong enough to fight off. And we needed to procreate, to perpetuate the species. That was it, that was all mankind had to do.
Fast-forward a few generations, however, and we’re all glued to these clever handheld devices that allow us to send suggestive messages to strangers, while people on small motorised horses bring greasy food to our houses, as we watch picture shows on the magic screens in our living rooms about people we don’t know trying to survive a primitive cave-dwelling lifestyle in some far-flung jungle. We’re weird, aren’t we?
So, for the sake of a simple life, Andrew could have just bought himself a BMW M4 and enjoyed it for what it was. That would have been the logical thing for a modern human to do. Or he could have just kept the Mercedes CLA he had before that. But the species hasn’t evolved through the things that we merely could have done. That’s why people flew to the moon in the 1960s, instead of simply speculating that it might be possible. It’s one thing to theorise, it’s quite another to act. So in his own unique modifying microcosm, Andrew is effectively changing the future. That’s pretty cool.
This is all hard-wired into Andrew’s DNA; obviously, he really doesn’t have any means to change the course of this destiny. “I’ve always owned modified cars,” he explains. “Unfortunately, I just can’t leave them alone!” We’d suggest that this is an overly modest use of the adverb ‘unfortunately’, as it’s worked out rather well for the rest of us. We like having pretty things like this Liberty Walk M4 to look at. And Andrew clearly has a good eye for this stuff, too, doesn’t he?
Want to know more? Check out the full feature in Fast Car magazine issue 392 on sale now in all good shops, the Fast Car online shop or alternatively download Fast Car magazine 392 now.
