Vintage vs Modern

I am probably not qualified to comment on this, as I am a fairly young guy and the closest thing to vintage is my 77 308 (which is by no means the same caliber of vintage as the 50s or 60s that have been discussed) and the most modern thing I have driven is a rather soul-less 91 Acura NSX. I love the modern cars' comfort and reliability, but I am absolutely enamored with the character, the smell, and the sound of the vintage cars. I plan on getting another Ferrari someday, and I don't really plan on getting a car made after 1979, truthfully I would like to get a Boano, a 250 GTE, a Dino 206 or 246, or a Daytona coupe. To me there is just something special about the total experience a vintage car delivers that (most) modern cars simply cannot produce. Now as I have said I am not particularly qualified to say this (especially) about the modern cars, and I do believe that there are a select few modern cars (F40, F50, Enzo, and the like) that could achieve a similar feeling for me.

There's my two cents.

Matthew

 

Drive the vintage car on nice Sundays or to car events and the Enzo Mon-Sat!
There is no greater fun than driving a car that at any second could break down
on the side of the road! (Not during rush hour but on a sunny 70 degree Sunday)
Here is a video of our Bandini starting up after 6 years of resto (not a Ferrari I know!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6l5mARSRYo&feature=channel_page

cliff reuter

 

That's the choke! Gotta love old twin cams!

 

I'm just not convinced of that.

I suppose you'll have to let me have a go at the P4/5 to prove it.

 

It seems modern Ferraris have too much maintenance/downtime that just isn't appealing. Take for instance the exhaust manifold problems with all the recent models. Or the fact that Ferrari doesn't stock 360 parts anymore!

 

I hope all here can forgive a post from someone whose old car experience isn't in a Ferrari

I think that part of the difference -- at least for me -- between older and newer cars stems from the way we interact with thm.e Older cars require us to engage them in ways newer cars don't. Older cars are high maintenance even when they aren't breaking, which means that we spend a great deal of time crawling in, on, and around them. We get a chance to see older cars in a way that we don't newer cars as we disassemble and re-assemble them. We get a chance to put some of ourselves into the car when we (sometimes lovingly, sometimes cursingly) work on it.

It helps that older cars are, in large part, mechanical. They are composed of moving parts we can watch function and understand in a very concrete way (aha! that's what distributor advance weights do!). Older cars are things that we know we can repair, and that are designed (for the most part) to be worked on and repaired. Newer cars, well, they aren't quite the same. My VW engine is hidden under a plastic shroud that makes it look for all the world like a futuristic cappucino machine. (And is secured by oddball safety torx screws).

We, of necessity, find ourselves focusing attention on older cars no matter what we intend to do with them -- even something as simple as starting a carbed car requires our attention. As does driving them with any pace.


I think that the attention -- the recognition that these cars aren't simply appliances designed to move us from point 'a' to point 'b' -- helps bond us to them. We invest more of ourselves in older cars.

 

Gorgeous car and great video.

 

Beautiful, and downright cheap estimat, compared to say '07. Has the market dived that much in a year?

Still, must remain in the realm of fantasy.

 

Were they not spinning in their graves right about - *now* - how Tazio Nuvolari and Enzo Ferrari would cool off

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/Piloti_Alfa_Romeo_3.JPG

 

Estimates for all the Ferraris listed thus far for RM Monterey seem surprisingly low, even compared with what was achieved in Maranello this past spring. Maybe a new philosophy.

 

With just a few Ferrari's on the RM Auction site, it's hard to say if the estimates will be low across the board. The ones listed so far I do not see much of a downward shift. I am not sure, but maybe the quality of car was better and more carefully chosen for the Maranello RM Auction, therefore the estimates were higher. The red 275 GTB does look on the low side, but it look like an unrestored driver.

Geno

 

How much difference in user-friendliness is there between a late 50s car like an Ellena or Boano and an early 60s car like a Lusso or 250GTE?

 

Unfortunately most difference is in the people driving them.....

ciao
Oscar

 

I've seen all but never driven any of those, so don't know...but will hazard a guess that my very early production (around the 21st-22nd of the 330 2+2 series) '64 330 was a good sampling of the general feel.

"Raw" is the adjective I've seen most of here, and aside from the roomier interior than a year-previous GTE or 330 America, more power than the 250's, and improved suspension/braking, I'd say that sums up #5409 pretty well.

As far as creature comforts, controls, etc, it definitely had one foot planted firmly in the late 1950s-very early '60s, and one in the early mid-'60s.

It was pretty much an antique, even by mid-to-late '60s standards.

 

Good point Oscar.

Cheers, Julio

P.S. My brother and I are crazy. We have decided to "try" to run the MM once again in 2010. What about yourself?

 

I think you nailed it!

 

One undeniable aspect of the vintage car experience for me is the number of years of ownership. I have owned my two Dinos for 33 and 26 years. Consequently, aside from all of the arguments in favor of vintage car ownership, they start off with the advantage of having shared my life for several decades. At this point, both cars are almost family members (they are definitely preferred by me over several actual family members!). The modern conveniences (antilock brakes, real A/C, and killer sound systems) are possessed by my three newer cars, but the purest driving experience comes when I'm in one of my Dinos. Fred

 

i think there is room for both in my life.
admittedly, the oldest car i have is the 83 bbi, and the youngest fcar is the '01 456mgt, so not quite at the ragged end of the spectrum either way, but absolutely worlds apart in driving feel.

i love the bbi for its relative rarity on the streets. i love the sound that they cant legislate away. i revel in the strength of the engine and the performance out of what is for all intents and puproses a 40 year old design and technology.

i drove it on the targa florio, and then back to geneva. it was great. i spent a lot of time and money having it made mechanically better than when it left the factory, which allowed me to rest a little easier and not have my eyes glued to the temp gauge. but, after a week of feeling like i was hanging on to a nuclear powered skateboard, i was ready to get out, wring my wet shirt, and hang up the keys for a while !

then last weekend i drove the 456mgt to monaco (grasse actually) and back. it was pure pleasure. cocooned in relative luxury but still able to go 150mph plus for large stretches of highway, feeling secure with my stability and good brakes. my wife was kept cool by an a/c powered by much bigger hampsters, and we could even have a conversation or listen to music. but the threshold for shaking it loose is so high that to really do it requires getting yourself into higher speeds and higher potential danger, so this is not the most fun car. thats where the bbi has it over the 456.

so my conclusion is that you need both. old as you can handle and young as you can afford. that way you get the best of both worlds.

 

Oscar, LOL. But maybe we should take this a little deeper. The focus of modern performance car drivers is higher performance, as it has always been. But now the performance levels are so high that they can't be fully exploited on public roads and/or without electronic aids. So much of the discussion turns to bragging about numbers generated by someone else, somewhere else.

Driving a vintage car consciously abandons the most fundamental impetus behind performance cars, focusing instead on personal interaction with the machine. There is an interesting historical parallel in the deliberate abandonment of firearms technology during the Tokugawa period in Japan, versus the continuing quest in Europe during the same period for arms superiority. One culture's focus was on war vs. peace, the other thought in terms of civilization vs. barbarism. One group focused on outward expansion, the other on inward refinement.

The choice of where to get off the treadmill is personal, but I think there are some fundamental factors favoring the decade centered around the early '50s. Earlier cars are more individually unique, and are constructed more simply from metal, glass, leather, etc. By the era of 275s and 330s plastic starts to appear, and we get deterioration instead of patina. Drum vs. disc brakes make a big difference, as does synchromesh on all gears. With drum brakes you can often sense the different performance of each wheel, and operating a non-synchro crash box well offers great satisfaction. These are visceral links to the golden age of racing, when you could literally see the drivers struggling with their cars' weaknesses.

'User friendliness' seems to be mostly in the eyes of the beholder. From my perspective maintenance is the greater concern, so I avoid anything older than the late '40s. In operating terms, for me anything without effective air conditioning is in the same general class.

 

ColdWater...no intent at offense or standoffishness in my earlier posts, please forgive if that's the way it came off.

I've owned a whole string of cars. Finally, in my early 50's, getting into where I could cough up the $$ to do Ferraris was a big deal to me.

In my teens, mid 60's, I had friends with '50s import sportscars...MGs, Triumphs, Alfas, Healeys, pre-XKE Jags... and remember them fondly, though I was a muscle/Vette guy with a distant and very distinct admiration for anything Ferrari; had a '61 Alfa Giulietta coupe ca. 1973 and would love to have it back.

Yes, in 100F TX summer weather, A/C is a must for daily stuff, but I'd rather have the car I want and do W/O the A/C.

Thus, the Toyota family driver and the first Ferrari with no A/C, the second, with a system that might as well not exist past 85F outside.