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The Action Hero’s Launch Pad

Superstar Jason Statham is building an incredible success story. Here’s how he uses his home base to fuel his passions

By Mike Zimmerman Photos By Art Streiber

As if someone called ahead and choreographed it. That’s the traffic setup before us on Sunset Boulevard: a half-dozen cars staggered at intervals between two lanes. Jason Statham, the Transporter himself, sees this and smirks. “Oh yeah, mate.” He drops the stick down into second and pops it. The engine wails and my skull slams back into the headrest. The wind tears through the open window, and I clamp onto the window frame, because this little monster car has nothing else to hold on to. That may be its only design flaw.

Statham weaves through the traffic. Slips it into third. Approaches 70 on the speedometer. Two cars, three, four. We’re in a friggin’ movie now. Then I see it coming up fast, less than 100 yards ahead: yellow light. Statham snakes past one more SUV, slips in front of it, and comes to a perfect, nonscreeching halt at the red light. He chuckles and shakes his head, clearly in the car lover’s private nirvana. “I tell ya, mate, a fast car is the absolute best gift a man can give himself.”

This particular gift is the Audi R8, a two-seat, six-speed V-8 that  has maybe four fingers’ clearance between the frame and the pavement. “Why couldn’t they shoehorn a V-10 in there?” Statham wonders. Audi’s letting him play with it, but he has every intention of buying it. The price tag hovers around $120,000. To Statham, it’s money well spent. A man is not defined by his possessions, he figures, but by his passions. And cars—specifically, fast German cars—make this tough guy’s knees knock.

“When you get into an R8, all that childhood shit comes back to you,” he says. “I got in a race the other day with some guy in a Mercedes. And it’s one of those things, ‘Oh no, I really should not be doing this.’ But this guy was such an ass. In one of those new SL55 AMG convertibles with his chick, and the music on. He pulled up really quick next to me. Then he zipped in front of me at the next light. So I got aside of him  and he’s giving me that look. So I dropped it into sport and just went whoosh like a missile. He never even saw my tire smoke.” Statham grins. “I know I shouldn’t have been doing it. But everyone has a maturity relapse sometime.”

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