Music to petrolheads’ ears
ALL IN TUNE: FEW CARS CAN BE IDENTIFIED FROM THEIR SOUNDTRACKS NOWADAYS
Love affair with souped-up Subaru overshadowed by the vroom of one Ferrari.
We stood on the side of a hill in a forestry plantation, just outside which had been stripped of its trees, so the view was good. But from that sort of distance, making out what sort of car it was in the middle of a churning funnel of red dust was almost impossible.
Sitting a little further down the slope from us was a father with his two kids, doing what apparently comes naturally to folk in this part of Mpumalanga – taking a day out to watch the Sasol Rally.
The kids – a boy of about five and a girl who looked about eight – had cans of Coke, but Pa had a blikkie with pre-mixed Klippies ‘n Coke (brandy and coke is almost the provincial drink, so I’m told).
Over the furthest hill, another red cloud billowed up.
“Pa! Pa!” screamed the girl, “Hier kom ‘n Subaru! (Father, Father, here comes a Subaru)”
I was just getting into the brand which would eventually become an integral part of life at Casa Seery (there are two of them now and my wife is as besotted as I am … with the cars at least).
One of the things I had noticed about the turbocharged Subaru Imprezas (a favourite with many a rally team, no doubt because the brand was a multiple World Rally Championship winner) was their distinctive sound.
It was an off-beat grumble-rumble, a trademark of the four-cylinder horizontally opposed “Boxer” engines, which give all Subarus their low centre of gravity and, therefore, innate balance.
In the case of the turbo cars, the exhaust routing and special “sports” pipes and silencers (or lack thereof) amplified the sound.
But, try as I might, I could not hear that note from the approaching dust cloud. Nor could I see the shape.
When the snub nose and outrageous airscoop of the Impreza hove into view, I realised I had been out-petrol-headed by a kid…
Even though I am slightly deaf in one ear these days (the result of allowing a swimming-induced ear infection to go too long without treatment), I still like to see if I can recognise a car from the sound it makes.
I could do that easily when I was a kid: the sounds made by sucking side-draught Weber carbs on an Alfa GT is different to the brawny straight-six song from the Jaguar Mark II – which is again different from the V8 growl from an Camaro RS, while my mother’s three-cylinder, two-stroke DKW Junior brought new resonance to the phrases “ning-ding-ding”. Today, though, very few cars stand out from their soundtracks. A Honda sounds like a Toyota, sounds like a Mazda, sounds like a – you get the picture. Golf GTIs and other turbo VWs and Audis are different because of the “vrrrr-pahhhh” noise the DSG twin-clutch transmission system evokes from the engine with quick gear changes or coming off the throttle. Even the iconic muscle car, the Mustang, is not the same as it was in the 1960s. And now the Subaru has grown up. It still turns heads, but my brother-in-law summed it up when I popped around to his place in a 2018 Subaru STI, the company’s fastest vehicle.
This particular one had been tuned by our technicians to produce more power than any production Subaru anywhere for the past few years. One of the tricks they employed was for a full sports exhaust. It’s loud. It’s proud and it’s unmistakably a Subaru.
For my brother-in-law it was even better sound than a V8 Mustang I had a while back.
Yet, there will always been one engine that transports me direct to automotive heaven and, surprisingly, it is not in a Subaru.
It was in a canary yellow (yes, that is a factory option) Ferrari F335 F1. The 3.5-litre V8 sat right behind my head, its twin cams and 40 valves belting out 280kW.
Driving the car on part-throttle was awful – it sounded like two Fiat Panda engines were in a rattly metallic fight to the death. Until just over 6 000rpm, that is.
That is the place where most engines die out, but where the Ferrari gets ready to dance. From there until the 9 000rpm red line, the F355 howled like no other car – outside a Formula 1 race – does.
And then the roads are, truly, alive with the sound of music…
Turbo VWs and Audis sound different.