CHRIS HARRIS
Carmakers seem to have gone a bit crazy now the end of the combustion engined car is in sight, says Chris
“SOD THE HEIRARCHY, SOD WHAT WE ESTABLISHED AS RULES, NONE OF IT MATTERS”
If the life of the motor car was an Eighties disco, Careless Whisper is currently soaking the village hall and two couples are drunkenly grappling on the dance floor. The party is nearly over. The place is mildly out of control and canoodling couples lurk in corners to take advantage of those last few minutes. The imminent approach of the end is making people do rash things – to make use of those final few minutes. The atmosphere is electric. In a village disco, that probably means a speculative lunge at the local bobby’s daughter. In Stuttgart it means the GT4 RS.
Porsche has just done what it said it would never do and fitted the GT3 engine to the Cayman. For years we were told that the Porsche hierarchy was sacred, that the Cayman would always be the understudy. They were the rules. But the rules don’t matter any more. Why maintain a hierarchy when, erm, the disco is about to end?
It’s hugely reassuring that even the oasis of calm and reason, fortress Zuffenhausen, is having a ‘sod it’ moment. Sod the hierarchy, sod what we established as our own rules, none of it matters.
The GT4 RS has a whiff of skunkworks about it. The intakes replacing the rearmost windows, the carbon plenum, the naughty front splitter. And the spec is a list of all the things Porsche said it wouldn’t do. There’s no rear steering, the locking diff is mechanical, the whole thing has a note of Mopar to it – “see if you can wedge that in there”. That’s an engine, not an Eighties disco reference.
The sod it mentality is rife in all corners of the car world. Engineers are having barriers set by marketing men and financial foreheads removed to take advantage of the last hurrah. No one has a long-term ICE strategy any more, they just want to make and sell as much cool stuff as possible before Careless Whisper ends.
The 812 Competizione is evidence that Ferrari is right in the middle of its own sod it moment. The final atmospheric V12 is insane. I drove it on a wet circuit and can’t help but think that the same effect could be achieved, with a reduction in potential repair costs to the car at least, if someone from Maranello just offered to have a fist fight with you instead of driving. I just can’t believe that the only qualification for buying this stuff is having cash. With the systems off, on a damp road, it’s lunacy. I happen to love it.
They’re all saying sod it. BMW has a 4WD M3 that will do 0–100mph in a tick over seven seconds. This is the surest indicator that there will not be another M3 of this type because there is no room for the performance to improve. Sod it, let’s just give them all we have while we still can.
But isn’t it interesting that the electric car has in some ways already reached the sod it point? The new Rimac, I’ve been told, can do 0–180mph in about nine seconds. I can’t process that. But because the electric car struggles so much to involve the driver or be ‘fun’, it has to rely on raw speed. And it would appear that it has already become as fast as can be, at the very beginning of its life.
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