Goodbye, lunch break: Supercar configurators are your new addiction

When I was 13, my IT teacher sent a note home to my parents to tell them that I’d been caught viewing “inappropriate websites” in a lesson. They were naturally concerned – what could an innocent young teenager such as myself be looking at?

The answer, to their eternal relief, was the configurator for the then new Aston Martin DB11.

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For as long as I’ve had access to the internet, I’ve been squandering copious amounts of precious time speccing up cars I’ll never buy. I think the first configurator I ever found was for the Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport, which went live pretty much when I was still in a nappy.

I remember being downright astonished by the detail you could go into even back then, from the more regular options like selecting the split-tone paint finish and which wheels you’d like, all the way to more obscure things like your choice of finish for the fuel filler cap. It was certainly a mammoth test of strength for the old family laptop, which was operating right at the limits of its feeble processing power if the constant, deafening noise of the fan was anything to go by.

If I was at all interested in a new sports car or luxury car, I’d have a go at making one online, but I’d just as happily get stuck into the options of some more mainstream metal because of how detailed those configurators were: the Fiat 500 springs to mind, with thousands of colour, trim and decal options available.

From a pure enthusiast’s standpoint, I don’t think you can really get a read on just how much you like a new car until you’ve specced it to your own taste. Take the recently launched Ferrari 849 Testarossa, for instance – a car I wasn’t initially sold on visually until I went to the company’s website and built one in a 1970s-style bronze called Giallo Ambra with all-silver wheels, at which point I decided that it looked really quite good after all.

Thankfully, I’m not alone in this: whenever a really exciting new car is launched, my friends and I will all have a go and share our results with each other to see whose is the most tasteful of the lot. Maybe we’re just a bit odd, come to think of it. But it’s huge fun.

Spending not insignificant amounts of time choosing how you would spec a car you’ll never be even close to buying is, rationally, a mad thing to do. But it’s almost like I inhabit another being whenever I load one up, escaping into some ludicrous reality where I’m actually a bloke richer than Croesus who has decided to plough his money into nothing but cars. The decision of whether or not I’d like carbonfibre centre caps suddenly seems extremely important, much more so than deciding what to have for dinner or what colour to paint my bedroom.

The configurator league tables? Well, Aston Martin’s must be up there, despite getting me into such trouble all those years ago – it has been great for as long as I can remember, and only seems to get better as time goes on. You can choose any of the current production models, select from a possibly unmatched list of colours to paint them and then load “your” car parked up in environments as varied as the Scottish Highlands and the Brooklyn Bridge.

Rolls-Royce’s is also predictably fantastic, as are equivalents from Lamborghini, Bentley and, of course, Porsche, which gives you free rein with its vast array of paint-to-sample colours. Even Morgan has a brilliant one these days.

Sadly, some configurators remain locked away to maintain customer exclusivity. I’ve heard amazing things about the current Bugatti configurator, open only to its extremely well-heeled clients – and I’d love to have a go. Otherwise, how else will I know which of the nine available paint options I want for the brake calipers on my £4 million Tourbillon?