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Mercedes wins one

A A A Comments By THEO DOUGLAS Thursday, Mar 2 2006

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Sure, it's news when a million-dollar Ferrari Enzo, one of only 400 made, gets torn in half during an illegal speed contest on city streets. But that does seem to happen periodically—muchly to the dismay of Ferrari geeks, who are shocked—shocked—to find that someone was actually racing an exotic car capable of high subsonic speeds.

In Orange County, we don't care that some Swedish millionaire with a .09 blood-alcohol level hit a pole in Malibu at 120 miles per hour. Or that he informed authorities that he wasn't the driver—it was a German guy named Dieter—sorry, that's Dietrich—who'd been at the wheel and subsequently bolted, leaving same millionaire holding the bag: with two cars instead of one. Except that neither runs.

No, the real news for the guys at the Mercedes Design Lab in Irvine is that a Mercedes actually won something this season—at least in theory, or alibi; they'll take what they can get. Apparently the guy in the Ferrari Enzo was racing an example of Mercedes' own supercar, the SLR—and, unlike whoever was driving the Ferrari, the person in the mysterious Mercedes (which hasn't been found) beat the Enzo, didn't hit a pole and kept on going. I say, old boy, capital bit of driving, eh?

"Ferrari's been beating Mercedes all season in Formula One," our man at Mercedes says with a twinkle. "But on Pacific Coast Highway, it's a different story." Yeah! (If the "Mercedes" actually exists.) It's payback for all that face time on Miami Vice. Bitches.

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