If you've not seen the video, you can watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCgibrhQvSw
The premise is that a handful of people were invited to Willow Springs Raceway for a ride-along in a Nissan Altima racecar driven by a pro driver. At the end (surprise!) it's revealed that they were actually riding in perfectly stock, street-ready cars. The campaign intends to excite car shoppers about what would otherwise be a pretty ordinary sedan.
The thing is, there's nothing particularly special about the Altima. If you took people off the street and put them in the passenger seat of pretty much any modern car driven at 10/10th's around a race track--they're going to think it's pretty damn exciting. There's just that big a gulf between normal street driving and pushing a car to its max potential on a race track (or autocross course, for that matter). But since most people have no idea what their car's capabilities are, they assume that only 'race cars' can be thrilling to drive.
That's the mindset I come up against whenever I try to get my 'car guy' friends to enter a track day with me. "But I don't have a race car" or "but my car is an automatic" or "but I'm not done modifying my car" -- there's always an excuse, and none of them ever actually get around to participating. They just don't understand what a rush they're missing! You don't need a race car to drive hard and have fun.
