Take a 1,300-pound Fiat X1/9 and stick a GSX-R 1000 motor behind the driver’s cabin, and you’ve got a serious weapon in your hands. Vincenzo Manganiello, who was just a wee nineteen-year-old when this video was shot, shows exactly how you don’t have to slow much for pesky chicanes when you’ve got a lightweight scalpel of a car working for you.

In its blue and white livery, this little monster slides nearly every corner on the hillclimb.

The sort of Italian hillclimbs Sr. Manganiello frequents occasionally feature irritating cone slaloms on the straighter portions of the track to keep speeds sane. Understandable, but for the drivers—especially those in heavier cars—these must be more irritating than an ingrown nail.

Well, Manganiello doesn’t have to worry. Not only has he been crowned Italian Slalom Champion three times already, but his Fiat’s behavior through the coned sections is remarkable; rotating more like a hot go-kart than a full-sized, fendered car. Of course, Manganiello is timing his steering inputs perfectly to use the pendulum effect of the rearwards weight bias to yaw through every direction change, and balancing the whole ordeal with the perfect amount of throttle. In other words, he’s not steering with the fronts as much as he is with the rears.

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Once through the challenging slalom, he’s free to exploit the 200-odd horsepower and buzz the GSX-R 1000 motor to its 12,000-rpm redline. The beauty of having that amount of power with a relatively-small displacement engine sitting over the driven wheels is the ability to spin the tires and still generate lots of traction out of the corner.

As we can witness, Manganiello is able to mat the throttle entirely even before leaving any cone chicane, hang the back end out gently, and still steer cleanly and crisply enough to get a good run out of the corner. No lifting of the throttle, no running wide, no histrionics, and no excessive wheelspin. Just the utmost precision and plenty of guts—which is even more apparent in the quicker stuff.

As seen in the slalom sections, Manganiello is able to steer in violently to upset the rear ever so slightly to “yaw” into the corner, and with that traction and relatively little torque, he can mat the throttle at the apex and just ride it out. For the benefit of our amusement and his sector times, the talented young man can manage this sort of behavior in the higher-speed sections as well.

Like a young Michael Schumacher, he can adjust the attitude of the car at high speeds to minimize his steering efforts and drive a shorter line through the corner. Watch in wonder at the amazing way he’s able to chuck his car—now repainted red and white—sideways through one of the fastest corners at 1:32, even with guardrails on either side of him! He may be young, but Sr. Manganiello certainly deserves a sizable paycheck, even if he’s not old enough to spend it on beer.

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