Has Ferrari become the odd sock in the washing machine of (motoring) life?
Consider this: Ferrari has already lost the 2017 F1 constructors championship to Mercedes, which means it’s a long time between drinks — nine years — since the most winningest team in history has taken the title.
So Ferrari chairman Sergio Marchionne immediately threatened to pull the Italian company out of F1 and focus on building SUVs. It was just over a year ago that Marchionne said you would have to “shoot (him) first” before Ferrari made a Toorak tractor or a wagon for Double Bay cowboys.
Then there’s Road & Track’s annual 2018 performance car of the year award. This year the legendary magazine thoroughly tested 10 “series-production cars that push the limits of performance and pleasure on both road and track”.
Ferrari didn’t volunteer a car. The mag said “some manufacturers are unable to meet our scheduling requirements, while others dislike the prospect of exposing their products to our unsupervised and unblinking evaluation”. Your guess on which reason.
The wildcards included the Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio, the Audi TT RS and the Honda Civic Type R.
Talking of Alfas, you should hotfoot it down to Melbourne’s Wesley College on Sunday, December 3, where the Alfa club is putting on its annual Spettacolo. It’s probably the world’s biggest Alfa event — then again, maybe it’s not, but there will be more than 350 Alfa Romeo and other Italian car makes parked on the lawn. See how I wrote that with a straight face with not one Alfa joke?
Anyway, the better-than-sex cars in the R&T test were the Bentley Continental Supersports, the Lexus LC 500 with a free cruiseline ticket, the Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 1LE, the Mercedes-AMG GT R, the Porsche 911 GT3, the Lamborghini Huracan Performante and the McLaren 720S.
OK, I know the suspense is killing you. The McLaren creamed it, with the R&T team saying “this pussycat is more than what’s new in supercars; it is also what’s best, what’s fastest, what’s most capable”. Now we know why Virgin boss John Borghetti bought one from the Zagame Cars showroom in the old Fairfax printing centre at Tullamarine.
Talking of supercars, if you are revisiting NSW’s Big Merino at Goulburn tomorrow, why not slip up to the extraordinarily well-run Marulan Circuit where The Weekend Australian Racing Team, or WART, will be contesting the four-hour Cheap Car Challenge in a Nissan Pulsar. How ethnically diverse are we? Last 24 Hour race in a German BMW and this weekend a Japanese Nissan with the cassette player still pumping.
Talking of BMWs, the Munich-based Mini and Rolls-Royce maker has just announced it is recalling a million cars because they might catch fire. With winter coming in the northern hemisphere that might be an added benefit.
Not wanting to get into trouble with Roddy Simms and his team at the ACCC for fraudulent advertising, can I just point out that the editor has put the motoring in the business section on an austerity drive, so there will be no Australian pens that don’t work, no blue T-shirts where the dye runs but I will have copies of the May 6 Weekend Australian for the first three readers who come up and say the secret word, Boris.
In today’s picture, which is there for no good reason other than I like it, is a replica of the US painter Alexander Calder’s Art Car which ran at Le Mans in 1975. This was the first of the BMW art cars but unfortunately art, engineering and French racing drivers don’t always produce a happy ending, with drivers American Sam Posey, France’s Jean Guichet and Herve Poulain pulling out after seven hours.
British dealer Duncan Ross sold the re-creation this week for what I guess would be about $340,000. Given Alex died a year after painting the car (I’ve said dying is the best way to get the price of anything you own to go up) and his little works sell for about $6 million, the original Beemer on display in the BMW Museum might be the most expensive car in the world.
Moving to Mazdagate: a Brisbane reader’s daughter had similar problems to the CX-5’s sudden loss of control. Her Mazda 3 SP25 GT did the same thing, unfortunately at major intersections. The Mazda service folk used their usual line: “This is a new, never-seen-before problem”. Unfortunately for Mazda, she is a lawyer with a prominent class-action firm. She got so fed up she issued a notice to the dealer for a replacement motor car. Eventually, the dealer replaced the whole stop-start system. If you have had similar issues with your Mazda, send me an email.
Moving to Australia’s greatest F1 win: four Melbourne high-school students sponsored by Swinburne University of Technology have won an international competition to design and race a miniature Formula 1 car. Against 50 teams from 27 countries, Trinity Grammar students Alec Alder, Kyle Winkler, David Greig and Hugh Bowman took first place. I am reliably informed Ferrari chairman Sergio Marchionne has already offered the lads a contract.
