Putting the hammer down in a hot German touring car is almost required these days for automotive journalists.

Rare is the piece that doesn't mention taking a vehicle to the limit and taking its speed beyond the legal limit. (Go ahead, flip through your favorite magazine with Track, Driver or Car in the title.)

And, so, rare is the journalist who has a clean driving record. The latest reporter to be accused of doing more than 100 in a fine, Bavarian tester car is looking at a possible $500 fine. It all happened in SoCal:

An unnamed journalist allegedly got the new BMW M6 convertible to hustle to 136 miles per hour, as seen by a ticket he received, according to the car blog Jalopnik.

The blog Winding Road corroborates the account, noting that the day before it tested out the same model a journo in another group was ticketed for alleged “triple digit speeds.” That publication says it went down in the Santa Barbara area earlier this month.

Jalopnik says the journo in question was accused of doing 136 in a 55 mile per hour zone. If so, it's a wonder that the CHP, rocking Ford Crown Victoria technology, even caught up to the driver. The blog says the writer is from the Pacific Northwest.

One way to beat the law here is to do what the show SuperCars Exposed did in 2010 and get the CHP to close Mulholland Highway for you. Really. (See video, above.)

Meanwhile, Jim Romenesko's media blog says the guy who shattered the speed limit this month has the initials “A.P.” and takes a wild guess that it could be USA Today's auto racing beat writer A.J. Perez, who immediately denied it, saying he's been in Washington, D.C., the whole time.

Anyway, in case you doubt that writing about obliterating speed limits is taken for granted in auto journalism, check out this excerpt of a Car and Driver review of a similarly equipped BMW M5 we quickly found online:

Speaking of acceleration numbers, we have them, stolen on a quiet side road in southern Spain while nobody was looking except some ducks and possibly a Chinese spy satellite.

… Launch control automatically dumps the clutch at about 3000 rpm and upshifts for you. When we finally did it right, the quarter-mile went down in 12 seconds flat at 122 mph. In another 6.3 seconds, the car was passing 150 mph …

The new M6, by the way, goes for north of $106,000. So if you can afford this, you can probably afford the ticket.

[@dennisjromero / djromero@laweekly.com / @LAWeeklyNews]

Advertising disclosure: We may receive compensation for some of the links in our stories. Thank you for supporting LA Weekly and our advertisers.