My new Stradale survived!!!

I never had opportunity to get my Modena much above 150mph, so I cannot compare the two at 180mph. But getting up to 150, the CS has considerably more pull... not that the Modena was lacking... it pulled quite happily up to 150... the Stradale just does so more quickly. And the Stradale keeps pulling almost effortlessly right up through 180. Above 175 it was working a bit harder, but still accelerating happily.

Yes, I was a bit disappointed that it got a bit loose above 180... enough so that I may have backed off even if I hadn't run out of road. But was that the fault of the car, the road, or the wind? Being out in the middle of the desert, it could have easily been some gusty wind. I didn't have time/opportunity to try it again to see what was the cause. Sooo, just reporting what I experienced.


Here's one more pic... on the way back from Vegas, stopped for a picture at Hoover Dam. For many more Players' Run pics, check out this thread.

[ Actually, those pics in that thread were lost in the disk crash... but they are now available here. ]

 

Many, many people have requested high res pics of my car... I'm not ignoring you... I just need to figure out a general solution... working on a website location for them so that people can pull what they want rather than me pushing 1/4GB of pictures to everybody. I'll respond to all when I have that set up.

 

I finally got around to doing some math on my cross-country trip reported earlier in this thread. During the trip I was extremely pleased with our 400-mile range between gas stops... actually longer than any car I own.

The Stradale's acceleration and weight numbers suffer from the large 25-gallon tank, since most people insist upon taking measurements with the tanks full. The fact that the Stradale is carrying an extra 50-70# in fuel is costly in magazine racing... but really nice on the road... and no cost on track or autocross since you aren't required to fill your gas tank.

Back to the point of this post...

How many miles per gallon would you guess a lean Ferrari with a big 425 HP engine could go? 15mpg? Thoughts?

On the track it gets about 11-12mpg.

How about on the highway? At 75mph minimum... not saying the maximum. 17mpg maybe?

For the 3338 miles of our trip (excluding the 225 track miles), the Stradale used 161.6 gallons of gas... 20.7 mpg!! And that is round-trip... so, just as much uphill as downhill... just as much headwind as tailwind... and very much averaged out over many fill-ups. So, if I had the guts to run it to near-empty, I could get 500 miles between fill-ups!! And if I'd kept the speed down, it would have been much better!


In other news, I took her to her first autocross this weekend... the story on that and some pictures coming soon...

 

I took the Stradale to her first autocross... and my first one in a long time... and we won our first trophy together!! It was an SCCA autocross held on the Texas Motor Speedway infield road course.

With the exception of the ridiculously tight start box, the car's handling through the course was exceptional... well balanced, smooth, and flat. Based on the tire wear and the handling, Ferrari seems to have dialed in an adequate amount of negative camber, even for autocross (which demands a lot)! How'd they do that given I don't see serious inside wear on the street??? My guess is the adaptive suspension and stiffer chassis. OTOH, maybe I just do enough hard driving to keep the tire wear even.

The (not too surprising) disappointment was the tires. I figured they would be pretty poor autocrossers. Designed for street and track, they simply heat up way too slowly and provide too little stick. At an autocross, they perform like street tires... but due to their road-course target, they have inadequate tread wear numbers to be given street tire status. Thus, they are nearly as slow as street tires but cannot be classified as such in an autocross. Oh well, lose-lose...

Handling-wise, the tires weren't too grippy, but they weren't bad. Putting the power down they were useless. I did the whole course in 1st and 2nd (hitting the rev limiter at a couple spots), so I had way more power to the rear wheels than the tires could put to the ground... even with the AC on. So, there was quite a bit of tail-out driving that could not be held through the tight, decreasing radius sweepers, forcing a lift and even more time lost.

So, with Hoosiers I'd have been 2-3 secs faster on that course with my high HP car. That would have put my PAX'd time right up there with some national caliber driver's PAX'd times. Of course, that's just bench racing... especially since I know my autocross skills are weaker than most of those guys...

Autocross demands the ability to learn and refine the running of a course in just three runs. I'm used to working one or two corners each lap on the track (where you get many, many laps)... so I dropped a half second each run... many of the real autocrossers were dropping a couple seconds each run. After watching the other drivers following my runs, I could see some key things I missed... [bench racing on] shaving 3 seconds off given an extra 8-10 runs and putting Hoosiers on it would have put the car running with the best prepped and modified street cars (can't touch the real race cars, of course). So, the Stradale showed real well; awesome for a car not really designed for autox! [bench racing off]

Speaking of show, the car got tons of attention... lots of pictures taken... and lots of video of the runs, based on all the cameras pointed at me at the start line. Hopefully they'll show up online so that I can grab them. I wonder what the Stradale sounded like during my runs ... there is a tremendous echo off the TMS grandstands ... just had to be cool sounding!

Damn, I love this car! Attached are 2 pics before a run and 2 pics after a run... I'll post action pics as soon as I get them... they should be in the mail to me.


Tomorrow I take the car in for its 5K (a pretty good first two months of life)...

 

Here's the promised action shots of the Stradale autocrossing... unfortunately, they're of the less exciting sweeper (no back end hanging out ). I'm still waiting to see some video.

Oh, and yes, the Players' Run stickers have been removed. I hadn't had time between getting back and the autocross.

 

Hmmm... there'd be good occupation... I could charge by what degree of terror I can evoke in my passenger! That could be tons of fun!

Glad you enjoyed it! Yeah, if I knew how to land a car mag or Top Gear etc. job, I'd likely be all over it! Such a tough job they have! Of course, I'd rather be one of Ferrari's test drivers... I'd happily move to Italy for that job!!

 

No, all seems well.

Had a check engine light due to one bank not firing... one time when I started it up, it started with really REALLY low idle... not even moving the tach... I thought it very strange... ran like that for 15 secs or so before finally kicking up to the typical 1300 rpm (where it runs for 30s or so before it eases down to normal idle).

That's a tough one... because I was going to take a long road trip and wasn't sure how much life I could expect out of a set of tires, I took my first set off when they were just half-worn right before the trip. When I finish off that set (that started off new for the long trip), I'll put back on the first set.

The tires seem to have pretty good life in them. I think they are more like max performance tires rather than R-compound tires... both in stick and tread life. They are somewhere in between.

The key, if you track them, is to make sure you never let them get above 34# hot (where hot means after a 2 mile cool-down lap following a session). After holding up quite well for a few thousand miles, I did an early morning session and underestimated how cold the tires were (how much the pressure would jump). Came in and found some serious chunking... and the pressures were at 37psi... darnit!