The last Ferrari design signed off by Enzo was the F40. Now considered the last of the great pre-software supercars it is a beast.
So "someone" smacked one into the Armco above Monaco recently. The car having been purchased by Lando Norris late last year, it's all a bit vague as to who was behind the wheel at the time. Go search for the video, for some curious reason a following car has lovely high-definition dash-cam footage.
It's cold and wet, not ideal for a "no-software-here" supercar with as much power per ounce as an Elon Musk Starship. You can see the driver goes to accelerate down a short straight... only problem being his right rear tyre is on a dotted white line at the time he elects to "give it some". Oh dear. Manic spinning, with no software control from said rear right wheel, which then slips off the slippery white line, finds traction on cold tarmac, and promptly spins that lovey F40 directly into the barriers.
Your scribe did exactly the same thing back in the early 1980's in a BMW 323i Alpina. Cold morning, light drizzle, bloody white delivery van in front of me as I needed to make good time down a Southern English coast road. Short straight presented itself. Your scribe dropped back to second, booted it, and pulled out... hitting the wet and slimy white line and promptly doing two complete 360 degree spins to arrive still behind the white van thankfully having hit nothing. White van driver braked, paused, looked out his window... shrugged and drove off. I pulled over, worked on getting my heart rate down to 200 bpm, and got out the car to check what had broken... Nothing. Tyres, wheels, suspension... everything was fine. Refusing to blame myself I looked under the car, opened the boot (trunk), and could find nothing wrong. That's when, looking back down the road, I saw how thick and juicy the white lines looked... I walked out into the middle of the road and slid my foot along the white line... more slippery than a real estate agent, seeking local government election, while denying a previous affair...! Good lord! I've been on ice rinks with more friction!
Humbled, I continued on my way.
So regardless of who was actually driving the F40, they had no idea how slippery white lines are, and no idea what it is like to drive a seriously powerful car with zero software on it. No traction control, no electronically controlled limited rear differential, no stability control. Heck, no nothing!
One has a brake pedal and an accelerator for traction control and a clutch pedal to allow for the selection of gears. That's it. Ask James Hunt, Niki Lauda, Gilles, Sir Stirling, Fangio... all the great drivers prior, for want of a better date, to 1995. If you misjudged it, that was your problem.
Today's youngest F1 drivers have never lived in a universe without ABS and electronic traction control! Adrian Newey and older people in the pit lane continue to race vintage race cars. They know what it means to balance the throttle, trail-brake into a corner or use an early down-shift for compression braking. They would not have spun that F40 in those conditions. Lando? Not sure if it is him behind the wheel, but unless he has spent considerable time driving 1980's or earlier cars on the limit he'd make the same rookie mistake of planting it... and hitting the white line.
Which brings us to modern F1 cars. No manual gearbox plus clutch. Lots of software, most of it mandated these days (refer Schumacher era...). Immense down force, tyres which could Hoover-up small children. One of the key reasons one cannot compare Fangio, Nuvolari or all those really great heroes of the past with the pilots of today is that the hardware has changed so much! So much. Not just the safety standards, but the actual cars were utterly different to drive back then. Dear Lord, early F1 cars had drum brakes! Oh, and no seatbelts...
So no wonder some young gun, who might, or might not be Lando, stuffed it under full acceleration in a 100% mechanical F40 where one is expected to handle all the incoming problems for oneself. Just watch those white lines... they are not your friend.
Max Noble
Learn more about Max and check out his previous features, here
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