So following on from my entry about the Ferrari California and how some of the tifosi were up in arms about this apparent “dumbing down” of their favourite brand, I was invited to attend the World Premiere of said model at the factory in Maranello.

The brand new extension to the old factory was certainly impressively gleaming and high-tech. Worker-friendly features included the planting of 100 trees inside the factory itself to add oxygen, and the necessity for plenty of natural light, and the fitment of wooden floor panels as the underlying concrete causes foot and back problems.

I was very sceptical of the “World Premiere” title of the event as the car had already been shown weeks before at both Pebble Beach in Monterey and slightly nearer to home in the Hurlingham Club, Fulham.

However whilst it may not have been the first, er, Premiere, it was certainly the most lavish.
Over a thousand clients (as Ferrari prefers to call its customers) were invited and the event was hosted by Ferrari President Luca di Montezemolo.
Also in attendance were Kimi and Felipe from the current F1 team and one Michael Schumacher who gave a brief speech about his involvement from conception of the California.

As expected from the slick empire that is Ferrari in the 21st century, the massive AV presentations on screens encompassing the whole hall, the fireworks outside set to music (starting with Queen’s We Are The Champions), the glamour of the girls on the stands (there were over half a dozen Californias there for us to pore over) and the quality of the food were all first class.

What about the car itself?
Well, as is often the way with modern Ferraris, it’s a lot better looking in the metal. It definitely looks best with the roof up and not in red, as I mentioned in my earlier entry, and thankfully there are three choices of wheels, one of which at least, does justice to the rest of the car.

The interior is stunning, as it is on all the current Ferraris, and I was correct in my assumption that most of the buyers are people who had not considered Ferraris before. One gentleman from Hong Kong I spoke to said that until now Ferraris appeared to be too “fierce” and track oriented for him, but this one would make a perfect replacment for his Merc SL500.
Certainly the folding hard top (14 seconds from coupe to spider) and the hopefully very smooth dual clutch 7 speed paddle shift gearbox will be the enticement luxury GT owners need to switch over to Ferrari for the first time.

Once there, I am confident that Schumi-developed driving dynamics will keep them entranced. Credit crunch? What credit crunch?…

Ok, you’ve seen all the coverage of the Lotus Evora and Ford Focus RS and all the other usual candidates, so I thought I would put up some pics of the more left-field displays.

First unusual car to catch my eye was this, the Aspid by IRF Automotive. Who? A start up company based near Barcelona with big ambitions.
700kg, and either 270hp NA or 400hp supercharged from a Honda VTEC. 0-100mph in 5.9s and 1.7 lateral g are amongst the quoted stats.

Attention to detail is higher than the norm for early pre-production show cars as these unique twin disc front brakes show. However at £70k for the base model and £100k for the supercharged version, this newcomer is going to have a tough time finding customers.

The aforementioned Lotus Evora was not quite as ungainly in the plastic as it appears in photos, but far more astonishing, for entirely wrong reasons, was the ludicrous Eco Elise: the latest in a never-ending stream of limited editions designed to distract buyers from the fact that Lotus has been peddling the same car for well over a decade.

The idea of using hemp as body panel material can only be the result of smoking too much of it:

The show was awash with concept cars, but Chevy seemed to be unaware that Honda have already produced a car called Beat:

And last but not least, yes the Nissan GT-R. There have probably been more internet words devoted to this car than any car produced since the internet began.
Regular readers will know that I have one on order and indeed placed a deposit a very long time ago.

However, the car is not launched in the UK until April 2009 and the London Show was my first opportunity to see The Legend in the metal.
I won’t bore you with the normal photos, but I thought this one was interesting:

Nissan had no less than 4 GT-Rs at the show and this one was mounted on a simulator rig that threw the car around in front of a large screen showing the infamous 7min 38s Nordschleife lap.
Proof that the car is portly at 1740kg was the fact that the rig had to take 10 minute breaks between performances to cool down and recuperate.
And luckily nobody was actually allowed in the car; 7 minutes and 38 seconds may be an astonishingly short lap time, but I guarantee it would feel a very long time onboard that simulator…

I’ve been to the Le Mans 24 Hours once before, in 1990. I flew down with a colleague in his light aircraft and we slept under the wings, which was novel, if a bit exposed.

Since then, the urge to return has been minimal, but the success in recent years of the Corvette Racing team in their mighty Corvette C6-Rs, and the fanaticism of some of the UK Corvette owners in supporting them, convinced me it was time to see these (supposedly) close cousins of my Z06 race in the flesh.

Like others, I’ve been wary of the reports of 10,000s of Brits abroad with the express intention of drinking solidly for (over) 24 hours, but I didn’t personally see any unruly behaviour and my decision to join members of the Classic Corvette Club UK in a modest hotel 30 minutes away from the track proved to be a wise one.

Sadly, despite having the loyalest and most vociferous of fans, the Corvette Racing team failed to win GT1 this year, being narrowly beaten by one of the gorgeous Gulf liveried Aston Martin DBR9s.

The Corvettes did have the honour of being by far the best sounding cars there though…

There has been a furore of controversy about the new Ferrari California in some of the more earnest enthusiast publications.
Apparently the idea of a less powerful, front-engined V8 folding hard top GT does not sit well with some commentators’ idea of what the Ferrari brand stands for.

However they seem to have forgotten that Enzo Ferrari always made comfy GTs to support the funding of his beloved race cars.
And Ferrari have always had a more practical GT at the top of the range, currently the 612 Scaglietti.

So bearing in mind the success of the Aston Martin DB9, I think it is obvious this new model will be extremely successful and get Ferraris into households that would previously not have considered one.

No, the styling is not outstanding, with the rear a direct copy of the ungainly Lexus SC430 with IS-F exhaust pipes, but it does look a lot better not in red and with the hard top up.

As expected nowadays, a new Ferrari debuts new technology and in this case it is a fusion of the 599’s F1 Trac stability control with a brand new 7 speed dual clutch paddle shift gearbox, helping to contribute to a 0-62mph time of “less than 4 seconds”. More than enough to blow any competitor into the shrubbery.

Company President Luca di Montezemolo is on record as saying that Ferrari would never produce more than 5,000 cars a year, but this model is set to raise overall numbers to well beyond 8,000. It appears that exclusivity is not as desirable as a fatter bottom line. Who are we to argue?

Only 5 days left until your opportunity to finally rid London of its snide, self-aggrandising, edifice-building egomaniac Mayor.

Don’t let apathy sneak the idiot back in. Vote Boris!

In case those of you outside of London/UK are wondering what the politics of The Mayor Of London has to with cars (and the far wider issue of personal freedom in my opinion), read my previous editorial HERE. Since I wrote that, independent figures have now confirmed that congestion in London is WORSE than it was before the “Congestion Charge” was introduced!

And in case you missed it, his latest stroke of genius is going to be to introduce a BLANKET 20mph speed limit across the whole of London.

If that happens, I can guarantee the accident rate will go up exponentially as drivers focus 100% of their attention on their speedometers (most of which are hopelessly inaccurate at such a low speed anyway) and none on their driving environment.

It is also guaranteed to massively raise pollution levels as everyone crawls around in 1st and 2nd gear, even at 11pm on an empty road.

If you Londoners let this fool back in for a third time, you deserve to reap what you sow…

I have often been accused of being a horsepower junkie, but I vigorously deny that. I simply choose to keep buying cars with around 500bhp and wantonly modifying them to produce more. I can stop any time I want…

However when it comes to race cars, I have yet to drive anything with a great deal of power (my Caterham Roadsport only boasted 120bhp) and the Team Auto-Journals Fun Cup racer (link) is not going to be any different.

Producing a stalwart (and apparently very reliable) 130bhp from its naturally aspirated Audi 1.8 four pot, the Herbie lookalike only weighs 740kg, even with that mahoosive GRP bodyshell.

The engine is mid-mounted, as indeed is the driver, in a cozy central seating position. Hell, if it had a passenger seat on either side, people would doubtless mistake it for a McLaren F1…

First impressions were of it being both very slow and very low geared. However when I took the time to look at the rev counter and saw that I was changing up at under 5k due to the cacophony of the engine behind me, I let myself rev it to the recommended limit of 6,300rpm and the gearing, at least, seemed to make more sense.

I know Donington Park fairly well and I was surprised to find myself keeping up with and overtaking far more powerful machinery (which, let’s face it, was almost everything else out on the track).

Despite running rather skinny Uniroyal “rain” road tyres, the mid-engined spaceframe chassis ekes out an incredible amount of grip from all four corners and the car was capable of carrying dizzying pace around the corners.

It is certainly going to be a challenge, learning how to conserve momentum rather than using power to accelerate away from corners, but I hope to be able to master it well enough over the 25 hour race at Spa in July so that the main view other drivers get is this one.

(Of course, considering there are going to be 160 identical cars on the track at the same time, that is pretty much a certainty for most of the cars over the race. It’s keeping them there that is going to be tricky…)

I know this might come across as another anti-British car rant after my dissing of the Aston Martin range below, but I had the misfortune to see a couple of Jag XFs on the road recently.

This shot is as good a one as you’ll ever see of an XF, as the dubious 1970s style models are doing their best to obscure most of the car and in particular make sure you can only see one of its ridiculous “startled” headlamps, lending the poor thing a Roger Moore-esque “raise one eyebrow” look.

Any complete view of the car is an entirely forgettable, bland-o-rama moment:

The extremely tall rear is far too close to the new Ford Mondeo, the side profile is a borderline lawsuit copy of the Lexus GS and the front is just plain ugly.

This is all made worse by the fact the C-XF concept car that presaged it was a very handsome car:

Yes, all the mags say the interior is great, as is the traditional Jaguar ride/handling compromise, but they are very wrong when they say that it “looks better in the flesh/metal than it looks in photos”.

No it doesn’t, sadly, and with the recent ruining of the once perennially elegant XJ range with its new pursed lip gurn, I fear new owners Tata will have their work cut out making Jags once again desirable enough to be successful.

I hope they will manage to, as I used to vow I would rather have an XJR rather than its BMW 7 Series/Audi A8/Merc S Class rivals if I needed a large saloon…

Ferrari have made the dual-round-rear-lamps a signature, but with the 599, they look like they’ve finally abandoned it. I made a list of all other the manufacturers I could think of who had made use of it, and surprised myself I could think of this many. Anyone else know of any others?

Following on from my controversial slamming of the E30 M3 and 964RS (link), I thought I would swing the spotlight onto Aston Martin.

How far can one model go? Since launching the DB9 in 2003, Aston Martin appear to have decided they had reached a design zenith and could not possibly produce another.

So since then we have had the DB9 Volante, which understandably is based on a DB9, but unfortunately despite all the much-vaunted advantages of using a high-tech bonded aluminium chassis possessed all the structural integrity of tofu.

Then there was the V8 Vantage which was a sacriligeous use of the Vantage moniker in my opinion, as it always used to denote the fastest and most exclusive in the AM range, and this model was the exact opposite

And it was also clearly a shortened DB9 with a Jag V8.

There then followed the inevitable AMV8 Volante. Except they decided to call it a Roadster to avoid confusion.

Later, supported by a (not very good) feature length commercial called Casino Royale, Aston launched the DBS, a DB9 with a bodykit.

Undergoing final pre-production testing right now, is Aston’s forthcoming four-seater, the Rapide, which is unashamedly a stretch limo DB9.

Exhausting all possible combinations of body length and engine size, they have just confirmed that production has been greenlit for the Aston Martin V12 Vantage RS, which is an AMV8 with a V12. Or put it another way, a stumpier DB9.

Oh and of course, there is going to be a DBS Volante. Or perhaps, bearing in mind it will be open to the wind and be as rigid as flaky pastry, it will be more honestly called the DB9 Halfords Edition Vol-au-Vent.

Now all of this could be forgiveable if any of these models were in some way superior to their competitors.

However I cannot think of one instance where an Aston Martin model is better than any of its competitors.

Yes they are undeniably pretty and clearly, for some, that is enough.

But if performance, reliability or handling are in anyway important to you, there are always better alternatives.

And before you go away thinking I have an irrational hatred of all things Aston Martin, I very much enjoyed driving fellow auto-journalist Jon Honeyball’s old school V8 Vantage and I adored the Vanquish which managed to conquer its woeful interior, reverse-dished steering wheel and pitiful flappy paddle gearbox by being both the sexiest looking and sounding car of the modern age.

There seems to be a pattern for recreating the recent past, what with Ashes to Ashes (aren’t the DOS inspired closing titles the best?), Mad men (which really does feel like the sixties) and No Country For Old Men really feels convincing.

Getting the right cars in a period film, certainly from a recent era where there might be enough of those cars around today, is tricky. We’ll be used to seeing those cars today as old bangers, but they won’t have been old then, of course.

It’s interesting that these three projects deal with this differently. Ashes to Ashes takes some artistic liberties (how many plods drove around in Audi Quattros?) to make use of the iconic coupe, and somehow the show seems weaker for it. Mad Men simply avoids it by staying in the office and smoking. A lot.

The Coen Brothers’ film gets it just right. The cars are perfect: boring, everyday sedans in showroom (but not too shiny) condition. The real stars of the show, however, are the rattly pick-ups in all their gurgling, utilitarian glory. Somehow, they seem to really add to the menace of the film.