Ever since Carl Benz strapped a
three-quarter-horsepower four-stroke to his Big Wheel, man has been fascinated
by the top speed of an automobile: How fast does it go? And more important, can
I make it go faster?
Nardo >
Test facility in the heel of
Italy; features a 7.8-mile banked ring that simulates driving in a straight
line at 149 mph. Built by fiat in 1975, now owned by Porsche.
One is VW’s Ehra-Lessien, in Germany, site of our Yellow
Bird run and where Bugatti took the Veyron Super Sport to 267.86 mph. Another
is the Fiat-built Nardô, in the heel of Italy. What possessed the Italian
manufacturer to build a 7.8-mile bowl with a hands-off speed of 150 mph in the
Seventies, when the average Italian car couldn’t break 100 mph, we don’t know.
Let’s call it foresight, because the track, now owned by Porsche, is booked up
to a year in advance.
It’s not just finding a slot at Nardô that’s difficult.
Finding the cars is tricky. You like to think tuners are knocking out
dyno-wrecking, 1200-hp motors seven days a week, but those are just
headline-grabbers designed to draw attention to the wheels, exhausts, remaps,
and cosmetic tweaks that sustain the business.
“It’s often a case of which tuners have a car ready,” Olaf
Schilling, Sportscars’s editor, tells me, as we wait on Nardô’s wide, concrete
apron. “Brabus is always good to have along, but they had to pull out with a
technical problem.”
Nicely
known for tuning Mercedes-Benz autos inside an inch of their proverbial lives,
Brabus has set about waving its bonkers wand on the M-B G65 with a notion to
add total connectivity to the mix
Politics also has a hand in proceedings. “We invited [Audi tuner and
DTM team] ABT,” Schilling says, “but they said they couldn’t come because the
VW Group CEO personally forbade it.” When your livelihood is built around a
firm’s products, the chief executive is a handy man to keep onside.
The winning 229-mph run by 9ff’s turbo Porsche:
boost, boost, boost. Tent full of German oance music: oonce, oonce, oonce. Vw
van at 168 mph: cool, cool, cool.
The 14 names on the final list fall neatly into two groups:
a few you might have heard of (AC Schnitzer, Gemballa) and a load that will be
alien outside the European tuning scene. Almost all are based in Germany and
have brought along German cars, the exceptions being Edo Competition’s Ferrari
458 and a Nissan GT-R from Switzerland-based Novidem. Modifications range from
the Ferrari’s mild engine remap and exhaust system to—gloriously—an insane
reboot of a VW camper van that resulted in the stock engine being ditched for the entire drivetrain from a 996-generation Porsche 911
Turbo.
Porsche
may have tamed the Turbo’s handling, but it can still give your wallet a good
scare if you buy a bad one:
The tuners hand their cars to
Continental to be shipped the 1000 miles from Germany, along with an estimate
of each machine’s top speed. Unbeknownst to them, Sportscars Managing Editor
Ben Arnold disregards these figures, sticks his finger in the air, and adds a
few kilometers per hour for good measure. Conti engineers consider each car’s
specifications, give the vehicles a physical check, and apportion rubber as
they see fit, choosing among three models of tires, from ContiSportContact 5 P
to the super-trick Contact Vmax, depending on load and availability.
Not all the tuners are delighted
with their lot. The wide-body Mercedes CLS from German Special Customs (GSC)
normally wears massive 295-section rubber under its boxy fender flares, but
the 255-mm tires it was given makes the car look like it’s wearing
space-savers. GSC’s driver isn’t laughing, though. Both he and the Novidem
GT-R’s pilot are concerned about instability at high speed, instability they
claim wasn’t present when testing on their own tires at home. Continental’s
Henry Siemons, meanwhile, points the finger straight back at the tuners. He
doesn’t exactly come out and say it, but you get the feeling that the guy in
charge of the tire company’s custom division isn’t full of admiration for
backyard tuning.
The
highlight of this package, however, is the engine treatment that boosts the
output from the standard 550 horsepower to a full 750 horsepower with a staggering
torque of 1150 NM of torque.
