348 build video from 1990

Surely this has been posted before but since I haven't seen it here recently it's worth posting (again?). It's low res and the narration is in French, but it's still interesting to see the cars on the production line and the test circuit footage is cool.

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Sm-T5Nqjuw[/ame]

 

I figured he was seating the brake pads against the discs but maybe he was bleeding the clutch. Would be interesting to know since I'd expect the factory to be using vacuum bleeding by then.

But that's one of the really interesting things about the video-- just like the cars themselves the assembly line as a fascinating mix of high tech and old school. We get to see the cutting edge (for the time) robotic welders and electrical testers contrasted with craftsmen with hammers and a worker pumping a pedal with his foot. Not as romantic as the days when the cars were completely hand-assembled but still far cooler than the current production line, which could just as easily be pumping out Mustangs.

To me the biggest takeaway was the footage from the test track. The video is dated 1990, which was before any of the later chassis updates. Recent press coverage tells us that the early cars were diabolical to drive and could not be controlled once they had begun to rotate, and yet here we see a driver doing just that with great aplomb. More evidence that a great deal of the press regarding the 348's foibles is pure BS.

As I've said before, setup is everything on a mid-engine car, especially one that has so much racing heritage. Get it right and the car is sublime, but get it wrong and the car is a handful. Here's an example of the latter-- for some reason this car is set up to rotate the minute weight transfer begins to occur. The driver handles it well but this is *not* a fast setup, nor is it confidence inspiring for the average driver: [ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VX4LcpoiIAU[/ame]