Magus Cars India

CALIFORNIA, ESPECIAlLY me northern bit, is purpose-built for driving romantics. Out here, you’rethe star in your own private movie. It’s happening right now, though we might have inadvertentlycast ourselves in the wrong film. We’re on the edge of the Sierra de Salinas mountain range, near Carmel Valley, where Clint Eastwood used to be the mayor. There are vast tracts of farmland either side of us, with one long, bendy road spearing through me middle. We’re in Porsches new flyweight Boxster Spyder, which weighs ],275kg. This isn’t just 80kg lighter man the regular Boxster S, it makes it the lightest model in the current Porsche range. With 320bhp on tap, the power-to-weight ratio is what you might call promising.

There’s a big, blue sky above us, and an orangey winter sun. We’re following another Boxster Spyder, whose exhaust emits a fruity Porsche parp as its driver works his way through me ‘box. Its back tyres kick up little curlicues of dust as it runs momentarily wide. Romantic, see?

Overtaking out here isn’t the teeth- gnashing lottery that is, say, junction 19 of the M25 on a wet Wednesday evening. In fact, in 20 minutes we see just one other vehicle. Unfortunately, it’s a vehicle that happens to be about 60ft long, and has mad Jack McMad behind the wheel with only his shotgun and whatever the US version of the Yorkie bar is for company.

Porsche no. 1 blasts past. Porsche no.2 finds a 32-tonne artic in the middle o/the road to be something of an impediment. We hang back, and layoff the fruity parping for a bit. He moves back over. But we’ve seen Duel enough times to wonder what’s next. Do we really want to play chicken with a big rig? Maybe this guy’s more of a 91 ] fan …

Porsche takes the business of saving weight pretty seriously. For example, the gudgeon pins on the 91 1 GT3’s pistons are ]80g lighter than standard, and making its connecting rods out of titanium saves another 150g. But mat’s the race-spec GT3, and though the Boxster Spyder shares some of its DNA, its role is completely different. This Porsche reboots a model line that goes right back to the company’s roots, to cars like the ‘53 356 America Roadster but more significantly 1954’s 550 Spyder (me one James Dean christened ‘little bastard’, with good reason as it turned out). Rummage through me history books a bit further, and it’s clear that the Spyder name is reserved for racing cars. Should we care that this latest one absolutely isn’t)

It’s also not an RS. Or a Clubsport, This is the third official and unlimited edition Boxster variant, the most powerful and, at £44,643 (Rs 33 lakh), the most expensive. And in the time-honoured tradition, what that extra money buys you is … less. Specifically, less roof. In exchange for
the standard car’s perfectly useful electric folding roof, you now get a ‘thing’, to fiddle into place above your head. They’re geniuses, these people, they really are.

Mind you, ‘thing’ or not, me Boxster Spyder looks fantastic, like a distilled Carrera GT. If not quite as rakish as some previous open-topped Porsche specials, me fairings on me newly extended rear deck are striking, and the body-side graphics are coolly retro (Google the 909 Bergspyder for proof). [fit looks meaner and less effeminate than usual, that’s because it’s 20mm lower, with narrower, lighter side windows.

There’s new engineering here too. While most of the Spyder is steel, the doors and single-piece rear deck are now made of aluminium, saving a total of 18kg. The new roof - which Porsche variously refers to as a sunsail or cap, which is why I will continue to call it ‘thing’ - weighs less than 6kg, while the carbon-fibre frame that holds it in position is just 5kg.

There are new 1 O-spoke alloy wheels, which weigh less than 10kg each, qualifying them as the lightest 19in rims in Porsche’s range. Inside, there are new lightweight carbon-fibre sportS sears, which trim another 12kg from the overall kerbweight. There’s a front bumper with LED day-time
running lights, black plastic mesh inserts on the side air intakes, and a black double exhaust pipe. The standard Boxster Spyder does without a stereo system or air-conditioning, though tellingly every test car I looked at featured both items. There are fabric door-pulls, there’s no cowl over the main instrument binnacle (how much weight must that have saved?), and the wind-deflector’s plastic. The centre console and dash facings are finished in the exterior body colour, and the gear lever shift pattern and searbelts are red. This isn’t the place for modern life’s rubbish, either; the cup-holders and door pockets have been deleted.

Modern life being what it is, most of these things are still available as options. As are things like Porsche’s Sport Chrono pack, which buys you the dash-mounted stopwatch, and a button on the centre console that sharpens up throttle response. Go for the dual-shift PDK transmission, and
you’ll get a Sport Plus button, that speeds up shift times and oversees a launch-control system. That’ll be a total of £1,920 (Rs 1.4Iakh).

And that’s just the tip of one expensive iceberg. The fact is, the whole options thing is a bit of a conundrum. What looks at first glance like a Boxster unplugged has the potential to be anything but. You can have regular leather seats and the full audio system as a no-cost option, or the full-on PCM ‘communication module’ with the touchscreen. Order that and aircon, and a good chunk of the 80kg weight-saving must surely pile straight back on.

Ceramic brakes are another pricey option, but more in keeping with the car’s lightweight ethos because they reduce its unsprung mass. The sportS exhaust, for £1,249 (Rs 93,500), which gives the Boxster a rasping character boost, is another option that should surely be standard here, but isn’t. In other words, an idiot Spyder buyer could easily send this supposedly 10-ca1 Porsche to the a11- you-can-eat buffet, or simply tick the wrong boxes, and ruin it. In fact, a fat idiot Spyder buyer would ruin it simply by getting into it.

Though ruin in this context is a relative term. Because even a poorly specified Boxster Spyder is still a very, very good thing. The Spyder gets Porsche’s brilliant direct injection 3.4-litre Bat-six power unit, with Variocam Plus variable valve timing. It’s almost identical to the Boxster S
but for a few important differences. With 320bhp to calion, it’s 10bhp more powerful. Peak power is at 7,200rpm, 950rpm higher than in the regular car. It has more grunt too, and a slightly Batter torque curve.

This means it laps the ‘Ring seven seconds faster than the standard car. It also means our time exposed to mental trucker man is pretty minimal, thank God. We head deeper into the valley, and by now we’re having so much fun I honestly ::-can’t think of anything that would work better out here. As much power as any sane individual could ever need, magnificent drivetrain, easily exploitable chassis … It’s quite a thing, this car - especially with the roofy ‘thing’ stowed away and the breeze aerating us.

Porsche doesn’t just do great engineering, it knows how to plug the driver right into the heart of the machine. So your relationship with all the major controls is perfect, the level of tactility not far adrift from what’s available in a decent racing car. It’s an intuitive, instinctive car to drive. (All the more intuitive and instinctive if you order the Alcantara trim for the wheel, gear lever and hand brake, and short-throw shift, both optional.)

But although it has terrific responses, it also rides surprisingly sweetly, especially for a supposedly stripped car. The UK have many hopeless road surfaces, but America’s infrastructure is piss-poor too. The Boxster Spyder has stiffer, fixed-rate dampers rather than an active system, shorter and harder springs, firmer anti-roll bars and a 74 TopGear more aggressive, negative camber on the wheels. On these satisfyingly twisty but broken roads, it could be horribly compromised. But though firm, it’s also wonderfully compliant and manages to find a Lotus-like
suspension sweet spot which preserves body control without destroying your dentistry.

Traction or grip aren’t issues either. The Spyder has a limited- slip diff, and the Boxster’s chassis has always been unflappable. Even on tight, slippery second-gear corners, where overhanging trees have kept things interesting, it doesn’t bite. Great brakes too, steel or ceramic. It’s an exceptionally good car. But not perfect. The roof is a bit silly, and we prove this by taking so long to fasten it on - it hooks over two exposed clasps on the rear deck - that Yorkie man actually manages to catch us up in the middle of a super-twisty forest section (what the hell is he doing up here?).

Imaginations working overtime, we make good our escape just before he can blast us with his 12-bore. Then there’s the small matter of how much a judiciously specced Spyder would actually cost. Working off the regular Boxster’s options price list, I manage to get my optimum Spyder up ro a rather worrying £54,353 (Rs 40 lakh) without trying too hard. Which takes it perilously close to used 997 GT3 money, and that’s a whole different ball-game.

Make no mistake, this is a sublime car. It has an abundance of all the things I treasure most in a sports car - performance, agility, linearity, character. But there’s a whiff of opportunism about it, and I suspect that Porsche’s people - the princes of lightweight gudgeon pins - could strip a bit more than 80kg out of this thing, to make it even more focused.

As it is, the Spyder’s marketing message has become entangled with the engineering one. It clearly fancies itself as a successor to Jimmy Dean’s infamous 550 Spyder, but instead of being too hard to handle, it’s possibly just a bit too easy. It’s no bastard, little or otherwise.

YOU HAVETO MOVE QUICKLY TO KEEP UP WITH

Ferrari these days. And, holy moly, you have to move very quickly indeed keep up with this new Ferrari, the 458 ltalia. This supercar is the new benchmark in getting from A to B as rapidly possible. Truly. It’s so quick it almost troubles me.

But first let’s talk about Ferrari - the little maker of the cars with the world’s biggest reputation, the operation that even I can recall just a few years back being based in a few knackered sheds off Maranello’s Via del Abetone (and I’m really not that old), but now occupies a campus that looks and feels like it might double for NASA’s European advanced research centre. An operation so devoted to living on the cutting edge of, well, everything, mat even the worker’s lunchtime spaghetti hoops on roast are served up in a canteen designed by Marco Visconti, in a building mar’s clocked numerous architecture awards.

Technology? It’s bigger than Catholicism in this corner of Italy. Once, the Maranello skyline was very deliberately dotted with guilt-inducing spires, domes and bell-towers; now, glowing Ferrari logos are plastered allover me steel auld glass temples of technology that loom out of me seasonal fog wrapping round us on the night we fly in to hear about, and behold, the 458 - quattrocento cinquantotto in the local, but I like its given name best… Italia.

Think of the 458 this way, the 355 - a not unimpressive car - entered production just 15 years ago. Since then we’ve had the 360, its higher-achieving sibling me 430, and that car’s evil twin, me Scuderia. In just 10 years …

But back to the 355, the skinny-hipped reinvention of the bloated 348, me latter possibly the worst car Ferrari ever made, and quite probably the car that made Ferrari wake up to the fact it was resting on its laurels. The 355, built from good old-fashioned steel, had a 3.5-litre V8 engine producing 108bhp/per litre, no traction control, no stability control, its only driver aid ABS, and was the car that would go on to introduce F l-style, steering-wheel actuated semi-automatic (and the phrase ‘flappy paddle’) transmissions. It was launched with a regular five-speed manual transmission, a regular heavy-as-hell Ferrari clutch and an ‘it’ll-be-OK-when-it’s-warmed-up-a-bit’ click-clack gate. A traditional Ferrari then; not really all that good at all, but, hey, we all still loved it. Now here’s the Italia, the most advanced supercar that money can buy - at least until the McLaren MP4whateverit’scalled comes along, and maybe even then, but we’ll leave that for Ferrari and Mclaren to squabble over later.

Flappy-paddle gearchanges have been designed, redesigned, perfected and disposed of within the 15 years that have elapsed between me 355 and this car. Gone. Hisrory. Left to Signori Massa and Alonso and the rest to deal with. This car has a dual- clutch transmission so perfect it spells the beginning of me end of me clutch pedal. Forever. Think on that - an entire avenue of automotive engineering examined, explored, developed, perfected … discarded.

And that’s not tile only technology recently eclipsed or quite possibly reaching the apogee of its development curve on this car. The ltalia is all aluminum. A mix of castings and extrusions (which dominate), strategically placed high-resistance aluminum and aluminum sheeting and, just here and there, a little bit of high-strength steel, for old times’ sake. It makes for a car mat weighs in at 1,380kg, yet comfortably meets all the off-set concrete blocks me world’s, and America’s, safety mandarins will ever throw at it.

Then there are the driver aids. Traction control, stability control, electronically controlled Ferrari ‘E-diff3′ differential and, yes, ABS. Only this is what Ferrari is calling ‘High Performance ABS’ complete with Mercedes-style ‘Pre-Fill’ ::- which gets the carbon-ceramic (natch) brakes ready for action the nano it senses you take your foot off the throttle. It’ll save you a metre-and-a-half should you throw the anchors our at 100kph says Ferrari.

We first saw the switchable driving mode manettino in 2004 on the steering wheel of the 430, and then with the Scud. In the most basic terms this allowed you to set the car’s driver aids to everything from shit-it’s-snowing to l-think-l’m-a- driving-God. The manertino in the 458 has moved on. Where before the system made some difference to the driving experience, with this car’s advanced electronics, FI-TRAC and E-diff3, now it makes all the difference. Previously, when you wanted to pretend to be Michael Schumacher, the car set itself up rock-hard and that was that. In the 458, with the suspension set to ‘Bumpy Road’ (come on, as compliant as this car is, Ferrari was never going to have a setting named ‘Comfort’), you enjoy the quicker shifts, the more aggressive throttle responses, the less nanny-like stability control of the track settings on everyday roads. It’s almost as if Ferrari believes some people will engage these banzai non-programmes on their daily commutes. As if..

Now let’s talk engine. Remember the 355 and its then- impressive 108bhp/litre? Well, how about I 27bhpllitre? With no forced induction of any sort, just space-age stuff like two- stage direct injection which blows fuel into the combustion chamber on both the induction stroke and the compression stroke, and an oil scavenge pump nicked from the FI V8 that deals with an unfortunate issue known as ‘winding’ - nothing to do with your infant’s indigestion, but everything to do with the unfortunate exchange of gases between the two sides of a V8’s oily end which can drain an engine of power the faster it revs. I could go on about the superfinished cams and the diamond-like carbon on the tappets, but you get the picrure …
this engine, engineered like everything at Ferrari by likeable, passionate, smart, young supcr-geeks who have done their time in F I, is state of the art. A work of art.

And there’s more to it than just that extraordinary specific output, which equates to 570bhp at 9,000rpm. It also has 540Nm of torque at 6,000rpm, a commendable 307g/km CO2 and a range of 539Nm between fills based on an ‘official’ average fuel consumption of7.5kpl… Hey,

come on! Do you really expect anything better from something this dose to a spaceship?

So there it is, and here it is, exactly the same size as a 430, yet apparently squatter and lower thanks to the extraordinary body Pininfarina has given it. You won’t be disappointed. It really does look like the Enzo’s little brother from the future. All cab-forwards and complex, dashing, compound curves, the rear fenders flowing off and over to the centre of the rear of the car like Batman’s cape blowing in the breeze. Or Harry Potter’s, as someone less charitable says. Certainly, to listen to the full explanation of every little opening and bump and lip and control surface, you know it’s required some sorcery to make the aero package work in harmony with the styling.

I had been worrying, last night over steak and potatoes, that all this technology would sap the soul of the car, that somehow, however crap, there was something rather honest and sincere about the 355’s lack of sophistication. The Italias neural network pumps shared information around its systems - it’s this integration of the dynamic systems that defines it after a11- but is there still blood, love, heart, passion in there?

Oh God, yes. It’s beautiful … a perfect cocktail of the traditional and the technological, with echoes of the P4 and the original Dino concept car in there as well as the Enzo.

Rows of little LEDs twinkling in the mist tell you this ride is going to be different (and with the fog still sucking the life our of the day, we knew we would be heading for the mountains, where, as recently as last week, it had snowed) but the grumbling, rumbling noise of a V8 warming up in the pre-dawn silence, coughing, finding its cadence, tells you is still very much a warm-blooded Ferrari.

In you climb over the wide sills the aluminium structure demands. The seats, apparently slimmed down to the thinnest veneer of soft, tan leather fit perfectly And really look after your bum, back and shoulders. They’re the first surprise. The second is the way it rides. The Italia has the latest version of Ferrari’s ‘SCM’ magnetorheologiocal dampers. Man, they work. This car is compliant and controlled like no other supercar you have ever driven. Period. This is a whole new game.

So when you bang the dual clutch down into first and nail the throttle, it’s almost a shock that something so refined can act so feral. But feral it is, the power curve traces a straight line from bottom left: to top right… this is the engine that keeps on giving right the way through to the l-can’t-quite-believe-I’m-doing-this- to-a-car red line at 9,000rpm. Hundred mph is less than 3.4sees, 192kph is lO.4sees, v-Max is over 202mph.

And then there’s the way it steers. There are just two complete turns from lock to lock on the Italia, and some hefty lumps of engineering ensuring that effort is translated sincerely and honestly into changes of direction. At Ferrari they have a measure of this component of a car’s dynamic behaviour, where activity at the steering wheel is matched against vehicle response time. The latter being a composite of all the stuff that makes a car change direction quickly and honestly and, believe me, there is an awful lot of stuff - from the design of the bespoke Michelin tyres to the shape and construction of the castings of the suspension components and a lot more in between. Plotted on this measure, the Italia is on the other side of the sheet to the 430, hardly an ingenue when it came to seducing snakey tarmac.

There is little, if anything, to fault on the Italia. I’m still not convinced about carbon-ceramic brakes on the road and I never worked our the logic of the parking brake, but time spent with the Italia is time spent with your mouth open and your brain re-adjusting to its notion of fast.

And yet, there’s something I do worry about. When Ferrari launched the FXX super-Enzo, one of the few legitimate aims of the concept appeared to be an examination of ‘how fast is too fast?’ on the road. That car after all had nearly 800bhp. And yet. .. it’s not just that the Italia is fast (at 1min 25sees around Fiorano it’s really not significantly slower than an Enzo) it’s just
that it’s so fast, so bloody civilised and composed, and so cool about being so fast, it kinda worries me. Seriously, the speeds you could so easily find yourself achieving in this car and the nonchalance with which you might achieve them … Please, don’t just think this car is a little bit better, sharper, faster, it’s so much better, so much sharper, so much faster that it’s easier to re-set the clock than recalibrate it. Don’t think improved, think altogether different to. This is a game-changing car.

And it is all that stuff, all that technology that makes it so amazing. Those dampers, that steering, that insanely complex aero package, that direct-injection V8, that ‘new-dawn’ double clutch transmission.

Buried deep inside the sales brochure for this £180,000 (Rs 1.3 crore) car is a claim that the Italias technical binge will allow owners to drive this car as fast as Michael Schumacher. Now, I don’t want to end on a bum note here, bur I wonder if that’s something truly desirable. I won’t venture an answer, bur maybe you could have a think on it for the New Year.