Get behind the wheel of an older Ferrari and you’ll soon see how safe and easy today’s cars are to drive
At Silverstone, Fernando Alonso drove the 375 F1 in which Gonzales won Ferrari its first World Championship grand prix in 1951. He did so brilliantly and hit quite a speed in the process.
One might say that was only to be expected because Alonso is, after all, a great champion. But in actual fact, those older cars are completely different to drive than the ones we have today. I learned that firsthand when I drove a 250 Tour de France in the Targa Florio and a 1970 250 GT in a recent raid in Veneto.
The differences really are enormous and start with the driver’s position. The older steering wheels are very large and take a huge amount of strength to handle because they don’t have the power steering we’ve become so used to nowadays. The result is that you have to sit nearer to the steering wheel to get a proper grip. Which in turns means that you are driving with your legs all bent. That completely changes your relationship with the pedals with the added complication that a badly synchronised gearbox will require the famous, but now almost completely unknown, “heel-and-toe” driving technique.
Another huge difference is that those older cars had drum brakes in which large shoes are pushed against the inside walls of the drum. As well as delivering fairly bland stopping, the brakes overheat very quickly and can suddenly lose power, so that you end up with the pedal on the floor. Not a very pleasant feeling.
And that’s not even to mention the accessories: the windscreen wipers are ridiculous spokes that make a fairly pointless stab at cleaning, while all the commands are just switches or maximum two buttons. Another thing that we wouldn’t recognise today is the way the cars are fuelled: cars with carburettors needed to have consistently full – and very generous – tanks with the result that, aside from a mechanical pump, they also often needed a (very delicate) electric pump too which would be activated when the engine started coughing and spluttering, or even just cut out.
All in all, however, the funny thing is that after you’ve driven one of those older cars for hours and then you get back into your own modern one, you have a period of readjustment to go through: the steering wheel feels buttery and, even more importantly, when you brake, you run the risk of bashing your nose against the steering wheel because you’ve forgotten how efficient today’s brakes are.
PUBLISHED IN EDITOR'S CORNER BY ANTONIO GHINI ON 10.23.2011
Credit: Ferrari S.p.A. (www.ferrari.com)
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