Tag: Cars

Running With Jodie

Classic Beauty, Drive Time

Many if not most of my Readers will be unfamiliar with the impossibly-lanky Jodie Kidd.  Here’s a brief summary of her curriculum vitae  (because she’s a Brit):

  • one of the first supermodels (along with Kate Moss and her ilk)
  • equestrienne (actually a polo player)
  • race car driver — divided between three U.S. Gumball Rallies, as many European Gumballs, four Mille Miglia races, and a driver (and two-time winner) in the Italian Maserati Trofeo races.
  • Now?  She owns a delightful little pub in Sussex just down the road from Goodwood, and
  • interviews interesting people on her own channel.

After the modeling thing ended, she got into car racing first with the Gumballs, and then as a guest on the late-lamented Top Gear, where she was briefly the fastest driver in the Reasonably-Priced Car segment.

After you’ve watched that little episode (note her joyful little dance when learning that she’d beaten everyone (including Clarkson), take a look at her now, on the excellent Cars & Money EeeeewwwChooob channel.

And finally, on her own channel (Kidd in a Sweet Shop), watch her drive quite possibly the greatest sports car ever made, the Alfa Romeo Tipo 33 — or rather, a reincarnation thereof.  (Story is in the video, but it ends with her saying, “I’m just going to keep driving until they tell me to stop.” )

After that, I defy y’all not to watch more of her shows on the Sweet Shop channel — I did, a lot.

It’s also impossible not to fall in love with her, a little — she loves cars as much or more than anyone on the planet — and it’s a great way to spend a weekend.

No need to thank me;  it’s all part of the service.

Almost Like Driving

Drive Time

Longtime Readers will know of my dislike of things that automate the way we operate machinery, whether semi-auto instead of bolt-action rifles, auto-wind over manually-wound watches, and automatic over stick shift gearboxes in cars.

Note that I’m not saying there’s much wrong with the above automated operations, but just stating a personal preference:  I like the feeling of working a rifle’s bolt action, winding a watch and driving a manual transmission.  I know that this preference puts me at odds with, well, most of the adult population of the world, but I’ve never cared much for other people’s preferences anyway.  And yes, I prefer the female body shape of Kelly Brook over that of (say) any slender supermodel, and I’m in the distinct minority there, too.

Where was I?  Oh yeah, the manual operation thing.

One of the trends in car buying these days seems to be a growing preference among collectors for cars that are… less complicated than the typical offering offered by manufacturers like Ferrari.  It seems that there’s a trend towards buying older, second-hand models that are less complicated simply because the newest models don’t offer a simpler option.  (To give just one such example:  as little as a couple of years ago, you were able to buy a low-mileage 1997 Porsche 911/993 Carrera with a stick shift for less than $100,000.  Today?  $160,000.  And this is also true of models like the Ferrari 550 Maranello manual, preferred according its pricing over the F1-transmissioned variant of the same model.)

So now you have an automatic transmission, for example, as the sole option for driving a new car, and hybrid engines (gasoline-driven engines plus battery-powered motors) are the sole propulsion choice.

I know, I know:  modern automatic transmissions change gears far more quickly than anyone could do with a stick shift, so they’re more efficient.  This assumes, of course, that efficient gear changing is the sine qua non of pleasurable driving, and that the loss of control thereby is of no consequence.  Well, quick gear changes are great if you’re racing on a track, and automatic transmissions are preferable to stick shifts if you’re driving in heavy, stop-start traffic during the morning commute.  I’m not going to argue that point, because the truth is self-evident.

Anyway, Porsche once decreed (with typical Teutonic arrogance) that they would do away with manual transmissions altogether for their new 911 models — if you wanted to drive a stick shift, they sniffed, you could drive the much-inferior 718 (Boxster and Cayenne) instead.  And then they were astonished when sales of the 718 outstripped the 911, despite the cheaper 718’s inferior engines and inefficient manual shift operation.

Speaking of arrogance:  Ferrari noted the above trend, so they decided to offer a manual transmission in their latest model, the 12Cilindri (Twelve Cylinders*), as the “Manuale”.  In typical Ferrari fashion, they’re only going to make a few (1,499) of this model, to drive up the price and desirability thereof among Ferrari groupies and the Stupid Rich [considerable overlap].

But did anyone think that they’d put an actual manual gearbox into the 12?  Silly rabbits:  they’ve overlaid a “drive by wire” operation onto their standard automatic transmission — in other words, making it a transparent SIM gearbox that feels like you’re rowing through the gears, but aren’t, really.  And only for the first six gears, withal.  After that, the auto gearbox takes over (at more than 196 mph).  (196 mph?  WTF?)

And needless to say, the fake manual gearbox isn’t cheap:  the Manuale costs over $200,000 more than the regular 12Cilindri’s $600,000+.

So how does the Manuale drive?  Let’s have Jason Cammisa tell us.  (Like most of Jason’s videos, it’s excellent and well worth the viewing.)

And by the way, the 12Cilindri is pretty good-looking and produces (an unusable) 800+ horsepower, so it’s not all bad.  And it’s not a Duracell-hybridized engine either.

Still, under “Corporate Greed and Cynicism” in the dictionary you’ll find the Ferrari 12Cilindri Manuale.

Vai via.

*Ferrari went with the alphanumeric 12Cilindri, because Dodici Cilindri (“doh-deechi chilindree”) is almost unpronounceable to non-Italian speakers, especially Americans — their primary market — and Ferrari couldn’t trademark it either because it’s a generic term.

Followup

Drive Time

…on last week’s post about Porsche and its runaway wheels, Reader Al R. writes:

Regarding why knock-off wheel locks went away, it was the fault of the US Congress. In October 1966 the Department of Transportation was created by it. The new DOT immediately started dictating changes to automobiles to justify its existence. One of the first diktats of the DOT was the outlawing of the Rudge-Whitworth center lock, aka the knock-off.
Since 50% of British sports cars were sold in the USA and it made economic sense to build only one car for all markets the knock-off wheel was no longer provided.

But wait!  There’s MOAR!  On the topic of Gummint foolishness:

Also in the case of the E-type, the faired headlights were outlawed and the bumpers had to be raised, marring the beauty of the design. The DOT would continue to legislate stupidity with the 5mph bumper law that mandated the ungainly “diving board” bumpers of the ’70s and ’80s. The worst example of this law’s effect was the rubber bumper MGB.

I currently have a 1984 380SL project car that I am restoring and am considering spending about $3,000 (which I don’t have, alas) for Euro headlights and bumpers just because they look so much better than the DOT compliant lights and bumpers. If I don’t scrape up the money from somewhere I’ll have to look at those ungainly bumpers until the day I die.

And I think I should include Reader GT3Ted’s comment from the post, because he knows so much more about cars than I do.  First, from Reader Vonz:

“Center-lock wheel bolts and components were manufactured out of specification by a supplier, creating a risk of fracturing and wheel detachment.”

To which Ted replied:

Right, that’s the issue as I understand it as well. A specific batch of 2024 wheel nuts were not properly heat treated or possibly there was a problem with the alloy of Unobtainium they were made from that causes the nut to shatter after a number of heat cycles. When driven aggressively the wheel nut gets very hot.

But rest assured, those wheel nuts on the center lock equipped GT Cars are properly German over-engineered. They need 444 Lb-ft of torque to be properly tightened and new special wheel nut high-temp wheel grease each time they are changed. The nut itself (@ $450.00 each) has an internal locking mechanism that you are supposed to check for proper function after torquing the wheel. The little flap door inside the wheel center is supposed to freely move when pressed, then the wheel center cap goes on making sure that the grove on the cap is aligned with the bump on the wheel so that the pointy part of the Porsche crest is aligned and points to the valve stem.

[Kim’s 25,000-word rant about over-complication deleted]

Now on the race cars like my friend’s 935 that I crewed for, it’s a little different. You just throw the new wheel and tire on, making sure that you start the wheel nut in the correct direction by hand (each side is different) so you don’t cross thread it, then hit it with the nitrogen-powered wheel gun until it stops turning. Release the air jacks and send him back out.

My only comment on the above is a response to this statement:  “When driven aggressively the wheel nut gets very hot.”

I can understand the issue if you’re tracking your GT3 RS.  I can’t understand that heat problem occurring in typical day-to-day driving.  (There are those who can’t understand why anyone would use a GT3 RS for a daily drive, I among them.)

I literally cannot see how the “hot nut” thing could occur in the non-track 718 and 911 models, unless the Unobtanium treatment was really that bad — in which case it’s time Porsche reevaluated their relationship with the supplier.

This, by the way, is one of my problems with the high-performance cars of today:  they’re just too much for ordinary drivers (i.e. about 98% of their owners).  Engines that can rev at 10,000rpm, engine power that exceeds 600hp, when few people can handle power as low as 300 horsepower.  If you want proof of this hypothesis, just do a search on EeeeewwwChoob for stories of wrecked supercars — Lambos, Ferraris, Bugattis and Paganis, most costing in excess of $600,000.  (Mat Armstrong repaired one such car which had 57 miles on the odometer:  the new owner crashed it on the way home from the dealership.)

I’m not suggesting any kind of Gummint intervention, of course.  I just want a little more sanity injected into this market;  but I doubt it will ever happen, because there’s just too much Stupid Money around.  That bullet has well and truly gone through the church, and there’s no recalling it… more’s the pity.

That’s the Pagani Zonda R Evolution [sic]:  yours for a measly $6.5 million.

it has a 6-liter AMG engine, putting out 789hp and a top speed in excess of 230mph, and Pagani made only ten (10) of them.  Just the thing, then, for a trip to the supermarket, or church, or the range (as long as you’re only shooting handguns — or more realistically, only one handgun).

Except:

“Most Zonda Rs are hidden away in private collections, making public appearances of them exceedingly rare. It’ll certainly sound – and look – way better than any dubiously-shaped billionaire space rocket, that’s for sure.”

Phooey.

Forgetting The Basics — The Porsche Story

Corporate Fuckery, Drive Time

I had to laugh at this one.  Porsche is one of the chief sinners in the “Technik Uber Alles”  trend among car manufacturers, the trend whereby letting the engineers loose on car design is seen as more important than giving the customers what they want, at a decent (not insulting) price.  We’ll talk about Ferrari later.

But in their drive to make their cars super-whizzbang-wonderful in terms of technical gadgetry (PSM, PDT, PDK whatever), Porsche seems to have missed one of the basic tenets of car design — a feature that has been critical since the first cars were ever built:

The wheels have to stay on the car.

Except for Porsche, it seems:

There are few scenarios more frightening than pushing a 640-horsepower sports car to its limits and having one of its wheels detach, but that’s the risk facing owners of several Porsche sports cars. The German automaker has issued a new recall for multiple 718 and 911 models equipped with centerlock wheels, and the risk is so serious that a Do Not Drive Warning has been put into place until these vehicles can be inspected.

Ironic, really, for a company which prides itself on its faultless engineering.

Here’s the thing.  Centerlock wheels have been around since the beginning of time, going back to oxcarts, even.  I still recall that mallets were a vital piece of a car’s toolkit right into the 1960s, e.g. for the E-type:

(pretty, innit?)

Then, of course, the trend changed, and wheel nuts became a thing:  five, six or more bolts anchoring the wheel to the chassis.  The great thing about this was that there was safety in numbers (not to mention in its simplicity):  one or two wheel nuts could be “loose” (i.e. finger-tight) without too much consequence.

The problem was that while this was perfectly fine for the consumer market, it was far from ideal in a racing environment, where the time penalty for changing several nuts on a fresh set of tires was burdensome.  So back to centerlock we went, not just in racing but in the consumer products — and as an added bonus, car manufacturers began to mess with the design of the tightening process, creating their own customized wrenches so that changing a tire was not something that could be done by the owner on the side of the road, but required a (towed) trip to the dealer.

And now we have this situation, where whatever Porsche has done in this regard is flawed, so that hapless Porsche owners are indeed faced with the prospect of watching themselves being overtaken:  not by other cars, but by their own wheels as they detach themselves and go spinning off on their merry way.

On a car that costs anywhere from $100,000 (718) to $300,000 (911).

Oh You Pretty Thing

Drive Time

Continuing on my deluded “Stuff I’d Buy If The Lottery People Finally Got Their Act Together” train of thought, there’s this little trinket:

1966 Ferrari 330 GTC Series II

Ferrari’s idea of a “family saloon” car, in other words.  Never mind that it uses a 4-liter V12 engine to cart the kiddies around.  (Not that I would allow any sticky-fingered little rugrats to get anywhere close to this wondrous thing, though.)

Compare and contrast this honey to any modern family saloon car:

Can’t find one to compare?  Didn’t think so.

Yeah, $750,000 is a lot of money (#FerrariPremium), but as the current PowerBall cash payout is over $200 million, it’s almost a rounding error.