Matt Prior
What if the 911 were no longer a 911?
What if Ferrari’s mid-engined sports car model line had all been called Dino all along?
What if they’d all been called Dino? For reasons that will become apparent in a feature in this rag over the next couple of months, we’ve been thinking about long-lasting nameplates on cars. And apologies in advance, but at the end of this column, I’m not going to reach a single conclusion.
There’s a new Toyota Corolla ahoy – a car that has been called the Auris in Europe for a while, for reasons I’ve never quite understood – but globally, Corolla remains the best-selling vehicle nameplate of all time. Toyota has sold more than 45 million Corollas since 1966. (Probably more than 46 or 47 million by now, and increasing by the second, but it has kinda got to the stage where one only measures the output in multiples of five million.)
Which adds, one way or another, a certain significance of feel to the arrival of a new Corolla, doesn’t it? One could make the argument, although I’m not sure I would, that it’s the most important car in the world and, in a similar vein, there’s an extra frisson about the arrival of a new Volkswagen Golf, what with it being a new Golf!
Meanwhile, it’s extremely easy to make a case that the Porsche 911 is the greatest sports car of all time (and I probably would do that) because the 911 has always been, and presumably always will be, the 911.
Which makes me wonder: what if it wasn’t the only one?
What if Ferrari’s mid-engined sports car model line, a consistent model series originating with the (non-ferrari-badged) Dino and currently peaking on the high notes of the latest 488 Pista, had all been called Dino all along?
For one, I suppose, if it had been, there would be two contenders for the tag of ‘greatest sports car ever’.
But would it have affected how Ferrari, a company not known for over-sentimentalism, approached the design of a replacement model?
When engineering a new car with a new name, there’s no compulsion to stick to principles established by its predecessor. Would you know, if you’d never seen either car before, or the cars that came between them, that a Dino 246 GT and a 488 Pista were cut from the same cloth?
Not in the same way, I’d suggest, as you’d know the latest Range Rover from the original. And certainly not in the same way that you’d know a new 911 was a model continuation of one that arrived in 1963.
And a certain weight comes with that, doesn’t it? One isn’t just designing a new sports car, but a new 911.
So it must have a flat six engine, which must be mounted at the back. And although the 911’s performance has grown sufficiently in the past 50 years for space to be created beneath it for another model line, it kinda does what it always did.
Every now and again, there’s talk of a less powerful Ferrari, an entrylevel Ferrari that I doubt will ever get made. But it’s a reflection of how the ethos of that model line has changed that when a lower-performance model is rumoured, people refer to that as a ‘new Dino’.
What if the new 911, then, was nothing more than a 992? And what if a 488 was a Dino? Would either be different, or the same? What is, ultimately, in a name?