Interesting old articles

TLDR

 

Classic Gilles. I know the guy who owns his 308 GTS today.

 

Here in Australia?

 

No Italy. It is owned by the the Giacobazzi family who were his biggest sponsor during his race career.

Villeneuve's Legacy Lives on in Modena | Petrolicious

 

that would be a great image to post in all the "how much will Ferraris go up next week" threads on fchat.

The aspect is missing however is liquidity, there were very few buyers after the crash and that drought lasted several years. Auction houses did their best to reflate the market, "selling" cars to each other but the reality was, that if you needed to get out of a classic Ferrari, you had to take a bath that was much worse than those graphs indicate.

 

very true.

 

Awesome, thanks for the link.

This the older gentleman you told me about in Melb last year?

 

Yup; but he is a lot younger than me !

 

And the amazing thing is that Ferrari were testing a semi automatic gearbox even in 1979......10 years before JB introduced one on the 639/640 (the 639 is the original prototype).

Incidentally, Lotus experimented with a semi automatic with the Type 76 in 1974 but I don't think it had the button/levers behind the steering wheel.

 

The problem with JB is that he pissed on his own chips.
He had a reputation for doing the radical and being the innovator. Which is very true given his initial McLaren concept (MP4 through to MP2c) and the Ferrari 639/640.

However, with his second stint at Ferrari, he was always changing the concept of the car every year rather then developing a concept (which he originally did at McLaren and Ferrrai). He got caught up in his own press of having to develop a new radical concept.

Look at Newey and Byrne....they took a concept and refined it each year until it became ultra successful.

Ironically, Byrne took Barnard's 1991 Benetton concept and refined the concept each year until it won the championship in 1994 and 1995.

 

the issue was the lack of software controlled actuators/clutch/fuel/ignition etc. It was the development of reliable & fast acting electronics (from the defence industry) that made flappy paddles possible.

You can't change gear in a dog box without lifting the throttle at just the right moment, which you feel through the gear lever. With the semi-auto, the actuators would break selector forks before the driver realised.

 

Apologies, thought he was an older gentleman.