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Telegraph
6 days ago
- Automotive
- Telegraph
Ferrari let me loose on their test track, then told me I drive ‘like an Englishman'
A Frenchwoman enjoying the same once-in-a-lifetime Ferrari track experience has just roared past me for the second time at Fiorano Circuit. A thinly veiled insult from my instructor follows. 'Are you very vigilant in your car at home?' asks Marcello Zani in the passenger seat. While others are hitting 140mph on the straight, I barely hit 110 as my eagerly anticipated 296 GTB 'hot lap' turns tepid. 'Be more crazy, like the others,' adds Zani with some disdain. 'You are very English.' After trundling back into the garage, Zani's point is proven by boffins in a Ferrari data hub where Lewis Hamilton hones his somewhat superior skills. The analysts take me through my many shortcomings and explain that the majority of drivers in our motley crew of international journalists are demonstrably faster. A Spanish enthusiast and a Canadian contemporary with zero interest in cars score better across all analytics. I've let England down, and also my late uncle Blake, who rallied self-adapted Mini Coopers and Lancias with some regional success in the 1970s. This trip would have been his dream, but it is plain the petrol-headed pedigree has deserted his nephew. A morning spent grappling with the 3.0L V6 Italian stallion has nevertheless been a hoot. It is a privilege to have super-smooth Zani sat alongside me to pass on his nuggets of experience from years racing in the GT3 European Championships. The car itself, in glistening red of course, is an absolute beauty but any vain hope that I might look the part at are dashed immediately as I bang my helmet on the door while awkwardly attempting to stoop into the tightly fitted driver's cockpit. Zani looks at me and shoots a wry smile as I attempt to work out where the gear stick is. There isn't one. He gets the water sprinklers out for half an hour so we can try out some drifting. I fare better at that, largely drawing on my uncle Blake's lessons in handbrake turns in empty car parks in the 1990s. But it is during the hot laps later, on the same track that Hamilton uses, that my inadequacies are laid bare. Lightning-quick reactions and balls of steel are required for the bends, with Zani instructing me to go hell for leather against all instincts wide into corners until he finally screams 'brake' over the radio. This car has a max speed of 205.1mph, but with me in charge, such numbers are academic. Ferrari's bottomless pit of data We are here at Maranello as Amazon Web Services, the world's biggest cloud computing company, is demonstrating how a digital revolution for Formula One and beyond in sport is gathering pace. To do so at the home of a tradition-steeped manufacturer, which still hand-builds its cars while robots take control, at rivals seems incongruous. But at the world's most famous sports car maker an old-meets-new mindset has taken over. 'I want to stress that this is a change in attitude, a change in culture, change in the way we do our daily work,' Alfonso Fuggetta, Ferrari's chief digital transformation officer, says. In a sport where marginal gains make a difference, Ferrari believe their partnership with AWS puts them in the fast lane as tech and AI shake up sport just as dramatically as daily life. Despite early season struggles in Hamilton's first year with the prancing horse, there is a quiet confidence that things will eventually fall into place. Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur spoke this week of his certainty that the Spanish Grand Prix technical directive will be a 'game-changer'. Charles Leclerc – described by team-mates as 'the geeky one' – is paying particular interest in how Ferrari's bottomless pit of data can help him. Encouragingly, even during underwhelming race outcomes, Ferrari have been recording the fastest times in the pits this year after engineers responded to suggested tweaks from AI analysis of video footage, which was again proven by recording the fastest pit stop at Monaco last week: a two-second service on Leclerc's car. 'What leveraging data efficiently can do is help close those gaps,' explains Ruth Buscombe, an analyst, strategist and F1 commentator who started out at Scuderia Ferrari. 'A great example of that was last year's Italian Grand Prix in Monza, where the track was resurfaced, AWS were able to predict the tyre degradation. Charles Leclerc's Ferrari ends up with a one-stop race, with the Red Bull and the Mercedes doing a two-stop race.' Teams and broadcasters are now utilising similar tech. Long gone are Murray Walker's often dicey predictions. Instead, the fan-obsessed F1 owners Liberty want viewers to be just as accurate in forecasting the drama. It is Ferrari, however, who are hoping to harness this data to the greatest effect. 'What is exceptional about Formula One is just the sheer amount of data,' explains Adrian DaLuca, a director of cloud acceleration at AWS. 'There are 1.1 million data points coming off 300 sensors in these F1 cars. Now, of course, if you look at just some of the basic telemetry on these cars, things like speed sensors, steering angles, engine speeds, these help tell some of the story. Working with Ferrari, most of those sensors are actually used to help guide their aerodynamic efficiency, help their race strategists, understand how they're using their tyres. So it's not just the data that is used to tell the story in the broadcast. It's the teams themselves.' Senna was F1's fastest ever driver, data shows Other sports have also taken notice. NFL and the Bundesliga are now also utilising cloud support. Data collected from American football players is at the forefront of tackling concussion injury worries. Cases have fallen around 40 per cent in recent years, with players now wearing different types of helmets for different positions. The company is now working with the sport to develop the first AI computer vision models that can detect and measure forces that cause concussions in the first place. 'Sports is inherently competitive, so they're all looking to each other, even outside of their own sport, to other leagues to see how data is being used and how technology is being used,' says Julie Souza, global head of sports at AWS. 'So absolutely, they're all learning from each other.' Experts say 'undoubtedly' that generative AI could quickly help benefit football's contentious VAR technology. Fifa, Uefa and indeed the Premier League will be monitoring AWS's progress in F1 and in the Bundesliga, although none of the three have entered into any serious discussions with the company. For F1, however, there is no limit to what AWS believes it is capable of. The company was initially drafted in to convert the sport's huge store of data into easy-to-understand TV innovations. Battle forecasts, predicting when a chasing driver is within striking distance of the car in front, and a myriad of insights around pit strategy, helping predict to upcoming drama in a race, were introduced. Aggregated data confirms once and for all that Ayrton Senna is officially F1's fastest in 40 years, followed by Michael Schumacher and then Hamilton. 'AI is not a replacement for any engineer or driver' The company's milestone was the 2022 redesign of the car. F1 employed a computational fluid dynamics design system on AWS's computing platform that reduces simulation time by 80 per cent, from 60 hours to 12 hours. The result was a 'wheel-to-wheel' new car that has helped herald a 30 per cent increase in overtaking in the sport. A host of new innovations are now in the pipeline, with talk even of lie-detector technology so teams can predict when a rival is issuing false information over the radio. Such innovations are borderline unnerving but Buscombe delivers some reassurance that Ferrari can harness the future while holding on to its traditions. 'AI is not an all-singing, all-dancing replacement for any engineer or driver,' she says. 'What it does is help you do what you were already doing more efficiently and more accurately. If you look at the reality of Formula One, it's always been this way in terms of embracing technology historically. In short, what's the fastest way for me getting from point A to point B?' It only takes a quick wander round Ferrari's base to conclude that purist philosophies remain safe. During our tour, we are taken to secret museum where Ferrari's spectacular F1 cars past and present are kept under lock and key. Hamilton's Ferrari will eventually come up for sale, we are told. It will fetch millions but you will need a garage already full of 20 Ferrari supercars even to apply. Despite the cold logic of the AI and machine learning it is now harnessing, Ferrari hangs on to its uncompromising extravagances. As Enzo Ferrari once said: 'Racing is a great mania to which one must sacrifice everything, without reticence, without hesitation.'
Car and Driver
22-05-2025
- Automotive
- Car and Driver
1978 Subaru BRAT, a Genre-Bending Four-Seat Not-Quite Pickup
From the February 1978 issue of Car and Driver. The weird little Subaru rocketed over the crest and launched itself into space, and as all four wheels left the ground, what had seemed like harmless fun only a few moments ago turned into a pretty dumb way to get terrified. Yes, there's that peculiar, familiar old feeling in the pit of your stomach when you realize you're in real trouble but that there's no turning back. Just as it dawns on the destroyer captain a few microseconds before he rams the U-boat that there's a chance he might screw up and sink his own ship in the process, the only thing left to do is ride it out. Go with the flow, even if the thing has no roll bar and you've got no helmet. Nice work, stupid. On the other hand, that's what this was all about. Subaru is supplementing its line with a secret new recreational vehicle called the BRAT, they told me, so go out to Palm Springs and get crazy with it. Since getting crazy with oddball cars isn't a wholly unusual pastime with me, it seemed like a good idea at the time, but as I trucked into Coin Capital of the Desert, I wondered just how crazy you can get in a foot of sand with only 65 horsepower. View Photos Al Satterwhite | Car and Driver Upon arrival at Subaru's makeshift press headquarters I had fully expected to find some bizarre clown car because we had been forewarned what BRAT stood for: Bi-drive Recreational All-terrain Transporter, assuming you slur the letters together and squint your eyes a little. But when I wheeled John Buttera's fenderless '29 Model-A highboy roadster into the posh racquet club replete with hip young waiters, there on display was a stand of surprisingly good-looking mini-trucks. Aside from the dumb-looking mud flaps on all four corners and a pair of bucket seats bolted awkwardly onto the cargo bed, the BRAT actually appeared to be a stylish imported pickup. As I found out, at Subaru, appearances can be deceiving. You didn't have to be Charlie Chan to notice the Subaru people twitching whenever anyone referred to the BRAT as a truck. At the preview breakfast they took time to explain that the four-wheel drive system was intended for snowy streets or dirt driveways, not off-road. And with that they loaded us into a bevy of BRATs and headed us out for a full day of off-roading. View Photos Al Satterwhite | Car and Driver That night around the pool it took some serious big-city investigative reporting in conjunction with a half dozen well-placed margaritas to get one Subaru type to cut loose with the real story. The import duty on trucks is 25 percent while duty on "four-wheel drive on-highway passenger cars, new" is only three percent. Which explains why the BRAT looks like the 4WD station wagon with the roof cut off. It is. Subaru, of course, is best remembered for those little 360-cc "egg cars" Malcolm Bricklin imported that were last seen winding their two-cycle two-cylinder engines to a painful death on some PG-rated Southern California bumper-car track. You might even go so far a to think of Subaru as Japan's answer to Studebaker, although lately, of course, Subaru has been doing just fine, even if it is tucked into the shadow of Datsun and Toyota. Subaru sales jumped 66 percent in the first two-thirds of 1977, passing Fiat and making it the fifth largest auto importer in this country. Of course, you've got to remember that the Japanese auto industry as a whole was up the same percentage in that period as far as imports to this country were concerned. Just how much weird cars had to do with Subaru's success was what I was here to find out. Moment of truth number one came on Monday morning when a train of BRATs caravanned out to what was purported to be the biggest pile of sand in the area. Off-road oldie Bill Stroppe had been hired to lay out a challenging, yet not too tough course where the press types could flog the BRAT without getting into too much trouble. Bill Sanders, editor of Four Wheeler and I sat in the back of the line and watched as five different BRATs tried to scale a long, sandy incline that marked the start of the course. When they all gave up and went around to the other side of the hill for the easy way up the gentler road, we let some air out of the tires and gave the hill a banzai charge in the best Gonzo go-for-the-throat style. To wit: Plunk it into four-wheel-drive, put it in first gear and leave it there, push the pedal down as far as it will go and don't lift, regardless. Despite the fact that the 1595-cc OHV pancake four-banger screamed a bit and sounded as if it was going to cough a connecting rod, the BRAT clawed, scratched, and bounced its way to the top with C/D's own beloved Turtle Wrangler in complete control. View Photos Al Satterwhite | Car and Driver Alone at the top we pressed on and soon found that second gear effectively cuts the torque multiplication in half, which flat isn't enough if you're in the soft stuff. Keep the revs up and above all, don't stop. This was no Jeep CJ-7 we had. Still, aside from one detour in which I cleverly turned out of the tracks and immediately sank the BRAT to its front hubs in the soft sand, the thing proved amazingly tractable. This may be due to the fact that the BRAT weighs just 2145 pounds wet, thanks, in part, to the aluminum engine and transmission. Light weight may mean good fuel economy numbers on the highway, but in the dirt it means that the thing doesn't want to sink quite as deep in the sand. Putting the engine ahead of the front transaxle helps on the uphill stretches as well, since the normal weight transfer from front to rear axle is reduced. View Photos Al Satterwhite | Car and Driver Obstacle number two was not the deeply rutted and bumpy section that caused the BRAT to pitch from side to side rather brusquely, but the Japanese film crew standing in the way. The fact that they not only didn't speak English but were also not acquainted with the rule of off-road driving that says "never stop unless you are pointing downhill or are on solid ground" didn't help matters, but a universal understanding of the meaning of a vehicle careening directly toward you with the horn locked full on helped resolve the situation at the last second. On the downhills, all you've got to remember is to stay off the brakes, leave it in low and let engine braking do the job. One BRAT-ful of neophytes either forgot or never knew in the first place. They rolled their Subaru, instantly making it a 4x4 convertible. More nice work from the press crew. View Photos Al Satterwhite | Car and Driver Just to make sure that we were giving the BRAT a full measure of punishment I had imported a ringer for our photo session. Danny Thompson works for SCORE, prepares off-road race cars for his dad Mickey Thompson, and does a fair share of off-road racing himself. He's young enough to have no fear yet experienced enough to know when to lift. And he loves to bounce around inside a 4x4. Thompson is your typical Southern California kid. There was one portion of the course which approximated a sine wave, something the off-road racers call the "Oh-shits." The name derives from the fact that every time the vehicle crunches down on top of the curve, bottoming out the suspension, you think every bolt is going to snap. And guess what you say to yourself? Going through this corrugated stuff with Thompson Jr. at the wheel is like being in an all-day plane crash. View Photos Al Satterwhite | Car and Driver Under his delicate ministrations, the BRAT's air cleaner kept coming loose and falling forward into the fan, making a sound like a plastic woodpecker, and a metallic ticking began to emanate from the engine as if something internal was contacting the flywheel. But we pressed on because we knew the BRAT was made of sterner stuff. And besides, we still hadn't really begun to get even a little crazy. After several trouble-free laps around the course, I managed to get the BRAT stuck atop the first long hill when I drove into a gaping hole and high-centered. But eventually, with Danny driving and me hanging off the rear bumper to teeter the BRAT so the right rear wheel touched the ground, we drove it out of trouble. View Photos Al Satterwhite | Car and Driver The consensus, so far, was that Subaru had done a fine job of making a four-wheel vehicle that worked well off-road even if it wasn't supposed to go there, and even if it is identical to the standard (read "cramped and plastic") car up front. And although it really isn't a mini-truck (even with the rear-facing bucket seats removed, the box has precious little room), the Datsun, [Chevy] LUV, Toyota, Mazda, and [Ford] Courier pickups are going to have a difficult time providing a four-wheel-drive unit to compete with BRAT's on a weight and price basis. Because the Subaru is front-wheel drive to start with, the standard five-speed gearbox is used with fifth being changed to an in-out gear to kick the driveshaft in for four-wheel-drive. That means no transfer case. And with a base price of just $4249, the BRAT has got to be the cheapest way to go four wheelin'. (And, while fuel economy is not an attribute normally associated with 4x4's, the EPA rates the BRAT at 26 city mpg and 36 highway.) It should be your basic smash hit in California where the off-road trip is only a short ride from anywhere. So Subaru has done it again. Hot on the heels of its four-wheel-drive station wagon, it has created another vehicle that has no competition. View Photos Al Satterwhite | Car and Driver But we're drifting off the subject, which is achieving craziness in the desert. Subaru had Stroppe prep eight special BRAT's with roll bars and wide tires for a special dust-bowl timed competition. Since there were so many press types, two-man teams were arranged and I got matched with an ad sales flack who was as checked-out on off-road driving as any 19th Century mayor of Hong Kong. The result was that by the halfway point our BRAT had course marker ribbons flying from the bumper and front fender, and a cardboard sign wedged under the windshield wiper. I kept yelling at him to keep the throttle down—"You're doing fine!"—but when he rolled the right-front tire off the rim it was no go. As we stopped to change the tire, we noticed the course was dotted with clapped-out BRATs with various maladies, and when I finally got my turn there wasn't much left in the way of equipment; the sand and standard press misuse had fried the clutch. But there was one bright spot when a Subaru executive shot over the hill near the start/finish line and stormed out of control directly toward the shelter that had been erected to keep the sun off the cold soda, narrowly missing a gaggle of stunned hangers-on. Normally it's the press types who get crazed and endanger the host car makers, but this turnabout kept us amused for the remainder of the day—not to mention putting paid to the rumor that only journalists are nuts. View Photos Al Satterwhite | Car and Driver The second day of bashing about in the sand drew toward a close, and I was increasingly aware that our time was almost up with no genuine craziness erupting to spruce up the action. There was a chance for a last try, though. As I watched lensman Satterwhite clicking off shots of Thompson thundering over the crest of the hill we had picked for the dreaded "jump shots," I said that I would like to take a lick at getting some daylight under the tires as it looked both fun and easy. Checking out Danny's approach down one side of a valley and up the other to the crest, I noted that he ran it through first, second, and broached the peak in third. What I failed to notice was that he let off the throttle and changed direction just before he got to the top of the hill where the road jutted left. Satterwhite motioned for me to get into our backup BRAT and do some "speed stunts" down in the valley with Danny for the final shots, the last of which called for us to zip down the valley trail in close formation making a lot of dust for the camera. Knowing that the guy in the back gets all the dust I opted for the lead position, but when I found Danny filling up my rear view mirrors, the old bodily juices started flowing. I knew I wasn't about to let Mickey Thompson's kid pass me and this seemed like as good a time as any to to try the jump. Only I didn't bother to slow down or turn because I wanted to make sure the thing got launched. View Photos Al Satterwhite | Car and Driver The first thing I noticed when I crested the hill was that suddenly there was no ground when I looked out the windows . . . only a really good view of the sky. Then it dawned on me that I was in over my head, but what were my alternatives? Flying the Subaru at the apogee of its trajectory was an odd combination of fun and panic. Do you remember the feeling you get sitting in the back of an airliner when it hits a really good "air pocket?" That sensation tipped me off to the fact that the downward portion of our flight had begun, which would soon be closely followed by the loud/painful/awful landing. The realization that the tail end of the BRAT was considerably higher than the nose led me to ponder the possibility that the thing might wedge its snout into the sand and come to an abrupt halt. Or perhaps it would even go "endo," as we used to call end-over-end flips at the drag races. I manfully refused to panic, remembering the destroyer captain and the need for true craziness. The area I selected to set the BRAT down in was just sand and pucker bushes, since the road had long since turned left. Because the downward slope of the hill somewhat matched the nose-heavy attitude of the BRAT, the thing just crashed down on all four wheels and everything was wonderful. No pain, just thunk-clang-thunk. The fact that it survived the Cook Death Leap convinced me that it was, if not a taxable mini-truck, at least one fine piece for having off-road fun with, and as we hobbled back to the Subaru compound to check out, I had only one problem with the whole affair. As far as I can tell, I didn't manage to get into any true craziness. View Photos Al Satterwhite | Car and Driver Specifications Specifications 1978 Subaru BRAT Vehicle Type: front-engine, 4-wheel-drive, 2+2-passenger pickup PRICE Base/As Tested: $4209 ENGINE flat-4, aluminum block and heads Displacement: 97 in3, 1595 cm3 Power: 65 hp @ 5200 rpm Torque: 80 lb-ft @ 2400 rpm TRANSMISSION 4-speed manual CHASSIS Suspension, F/R: struts/semi-trailing arms Brakes, F/R: 9.0-in disc/7.1-in drum DIMENSIONS Wheelbase: 96.5 in Length: 164.8 in Width: 61.0 in Height: 56.7 in Curb Weight: 2145 lb
