Florida Man Confounded by Manual Transmission, Destroys Supercar Worth $704,000

My father had an interesting method of teaching me how to drive manual transmission.

We purchased my first car back when I was in school — a manual 2000 Toyota Echo coupe, a car so poorly optioned I was amazed it had a CD player, even if you could barely hear it over all the rattles — from a dealership some distance away from our house in the hills of northwest New Jersey. After finishing up all of the paperwork, my dad handed me the keys and slapped me on the back.

“Good luck, son,” he said, turned, walked to his car and drove away into Friday-evening traffic as I was left to grapple with a stick shift for the very first time.

I learned several things in a hurry. For instance, I learned that people with automatics or who know how to drive stick don’t appreciate it when you stall repeatedly on a winding one-lane road. I learned that clutch timing isn’t as easy as it looks on “Top Gear.” And I learned that, rattle-prone though that bland, wheezing econobox may have been, Toyota quality still can forgive a 30-minute drive where the majority of attempted shifts end in a loud gnashing of gears.

I’m still pretty sure tough love isn’t an efficient driver-education strategy, but the reason my father let me learn that way was because, well, it was a 2000 Echo. What’s the worst that could happen with 1.5 liters, 108 horsepower and a few thousand dollars on the sticker?

The same things cannot be said for a 2006 Ford GT worth almost three-quarters of a million dollars. That didn’t stop one of the rare supercars from being crashed into a tree by a Florida owner who was “unfamiliar with how to drive stick shift,” according to police.

In early May, Road & Track reported that 50-year-old Robert J. Guarini said he’d lost control of the 550-horsepower car while leaving his housing development in Boca Raton. Guarini blamed a downshift for the loss of control, which resulted in him hitting a palm tree head-on.

Facebook photos show the extent of the subsequent damage:

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The owner told the magazine that it wasn’t just his unfamiliarity with the stick shift that caused the accident, however.