Lamborghini Is Forging Ahead with Forged Carbon Fiber
blog.caranddriver.com
blog.caranddriver.com
I'm general, supercars are vastly overpriced for what you get. You can easily crush most for a fraction of the price with a dedicated track car. But simultaneously, no supercars are remotely practical on the road, and in fact are not even fun to drive on the street because of speed limits.
Some supercars have been a good investment, such as the Mclaren F1, but the majority depreciate immediately.
I don't really see the point.
There is a Lamborghini series (super trofeo) but not much beyond that. I rarely even see them at track days.
Quattro drive (or whatever it is called now) is not really awesome for road racing. It causes too much understeer.
That said, I heard the Huracan is much better than previous cars.
(I own and have tracked a McLaren but I am thinking of swapping it out for something more practical for track use. It is less fun than racing my 1992 Spec Miata, for example...)
They are terrible investments. I buy cars after they have fallen way down the depreciation curve.
Working on a Chump car (http://www.chumpcar.com/) build with my brothers now. I've met people racing in that series who've owned every supercar imaginable. But when it's a beater with some safety equipment, what do you have to lose :)
I recall finally passing a GSXR1000 on my lowly CBR250RR about a decade ago on Philip Island, last few corners. He repassed me on the pit straight but then I got him back by nailing T1 and stayed there. That felt pretty sweet. (I'm a tall / heavy guy compared to the 250, so suspension etc was not proper; the GPR70 tyres were just about the only good thing)
Greetings from a Cagiva Mito rider.
The very best part of driving the Miata is the frustrated point by from the Ferraris.
Fixing your Porsche is expensive. Fixing your Ferrari is stupidly expensive.
If you want to have fun on the track take out a car you can afford to wreck. A Porsche with a track setup you can really let loose on is going to be way more fun than a Ferrari you need to be gentle with.
There aren't many people that have enough money to not worry about wrecking their Ferrari, and fewer still that have time to bomb around on a track in one.
Plus, if you run your tuned up track Porsche into the wall and it's a write-off, hey, shit happens. If you do that with a Bugatti or an Enzo you're just being a dick. Those sorts of cars are rare and deserve some respect.
There's also another factor: After-market modifications for cars more commonly made are easier to source. You can mod an Audi or Porsche easily, it just takes money, but doing the same with a Ferrari is significantly more complicated, you'll probably need to have a lot of things custom fabricated.
You'll also learn about braking.
http://www.roadandtrack.com/motorsports/features/a25615/why-...
If you are feeling lucky then try out rallying. A miata will also work but its quite a different experience.
(I have a GT4 car from another mfg and it is much less onerous)
Shifter carts are reasonably cheap and they're a hell of a lot of fun and adrenaline. If you truly like racing, that's where a lot of the F1 guys start their careers. Not the safest thing in the world, though. Spec Miata is way more tame, relaxed and safer.
I've had a lot of fun in shifter karts, but never been on the track in a real super kart.
The world is such a weird place.
While the prices are silly, one can ask why would anyone pay more than 20k for car when that can buy you safety and comfort for four? Just like my impulse purchases can be a certain amount that is fine for me but extravagant for some and cheap by others.
Its a shame since I would expect them to have better sense than that to have accumulated that much wealth. Then again, its their money so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Especially when the wealth is inherited or kleptocratic.
But if we think of wealth more than an abstract thing and more as a societal contract, then things do change a little bit. Wealth is society's way of abstracting the capacity to work. You can keep all your wealth in gold coins in a big building but without a society that values it, its really not worth that much. Wealth is a claim on other people's work, other people being members of a society. So, we have the situation that only the combination of wealth and society is actually worth anything.
If that is the case, it is in the interest of the wealthy, to foster a society in which 1) More work can be obtained in total and 2) More work can be obtained for less money. The former leads to philanthropy (betterment of society), and the latter leads to lobbying against taxation for the rich and other measures to redistribute income; since when more wealth is held by few, the few can make the many work for less (more labor than capital).
But wait, there is another dimension: if you think about the wealthy in Germany buying an expensive BMW, it still doesn't seem as bad, since the wealth is still within German society. But when you have wealthy Chinese buying a German car, then the wealth which was accumulated by the labor of the Chinese society is now going to the German society.
there is certainly some tipping point for this and after it's not worth it, and poorly-handling muscle cars leave me uninterested, but it works, it can be joy on normal roads and on track even pure adrenalin.
A carbon fiber supercar that impresses me (and is actually raced and wins ~ see last week's Le Mans) is the new Ford GT. You even have to submit a video interview because Ford wants actual enthusiasts, not "collectors", to purchase them from the limited run.
In Colorado, the Hummer H1 was completely worthless in the winter. His 4wd suburban hybrid was great in the snow.
Edit: The difference between the ford and the Porsche was that you felt every road crack in the Porsche, such that it was barely driveable.
They are status symbols mostly. They are absolutely not practical for any kind of normal transportation.
Well, race replica sportbikes are not fun to ride on the street for the same reason.
However, get out of the city and seek the lesser-known winding roads up in the hills, and suddenly the bike is a ton of fun. I guess for some folks the supercar is the same (not for me, though - for me the fun ends as soon as you put me in a closed cage on 4 wheels, no idea why).
Source: I've a sportbike and I play with it once in a while.
But a top Ducati sport bike costs 40k, not 400k.
For the price of a Honda Civic you get the performance of a supercar - plus the experience of riding cage-free, which in itself is pretty awesome.
*Minus the pneumatic valves and probably a few other things.
The replica bike you mentioned is a huge disappointment for one reason: "Europe and Australia are offered a 160 hp version, the American market gets roughly 100 hp and in Japan, it's an even paltrier 70 hp." Unless you live in Europe, you have to spend another $10,000+ to get it back up to spec.
I'd rather get a Desmosedici, I think.
There's a GT3 version of the Huracan, that's all I've seen.
http://squadracorse.lamborghini.com/en/cars/huracan-gt3/over...
I hope Ford does a LMP1 next year, too.
The Aventador was an R8 with a really good bodykit and there was NOTHING bad about that, it was the first Lambo in a long time that could actually take a corner at speed.
Actual racecar engines are rebuilt very frequently (same for dirtbike motors, etc).
"sports cars" (Miata, Corvette, whatever) are going to be like any other street car in terms of longevity, but something like a Ferrari or Lamborghini will probably need some work before it reaches a few hundred thousand miles.
That is most certainly wrong, depending on how you drive on the street, unless you're the guy/lady in the 5,000lb SUV flooring it and slamming on the breaks between every stop light then maybe. I have some experience with track cars, even a long time ago was involved in Allison Legacy racing--those cars use an engine straight out of a Mazda truck. I can tell you, when they sit all week and you do nothing but race them on weekends, they don't put out even 1/3 of the miles they would as a well-maintained road car.
>Sports cars" (Miata, Corvette, whatever) are going to be like any other street car in terms of longevity
Miata's are reasonably reliable, but Corvettes most certainly are not. Ferraris and Lambgorghinis used to spend more time in the shop than on the road, but they've gotten better. A lot of enthusiasts credit the Acura NSX with that.
You can also have a pretty crapped up engine well before 100k if you only ever drive to bingo, church and the grocery store.
Once you start looking at the details rules of thumb like $roadmiles = $trackmiles * $x usually can't be applied to complex systems with lots of variables with reasonable precision no matter how much time you spend arguing about x
Any raspy, high revving motor that needs RPMs to make power is going to last even less. Start modding and using race-purpose engines and it's even less still.
Edit: are you sure a lot of police cars are getting 300k in that kind of driving? I don't think all cops drive like that most of the time. I'm very skeptical of that claim you're making. I'd imagine most cop cars are retired around 100k which is what a quick Google search shows some agreement for.
Yea, it most certainly is
There are gotcha's like this which complicate the equation.
I have had two friends kill BRZ engines on track simply by putting slicks on the car...
This is assuming all other variables are consistent. Changing your oil every 10k vs 5k certainly won't help things.
http://jalopnik.com/5559767/i-sold-everything-to-buy-a-lambo...
Hell, I saw someone running a '94 F1 open-wheel car around COTA last month. He said he purchased it for less than 100k. No supercars would come close to those track times. Probably more fun to drive, as well.
Make no mistake, F1 and automotive racing is high tech goodness. Supercars are just overpriced.
Carbon is good in tension because you're pulling a whole bunch of atomically perfect lightweight strings, but when you have chopped up fragments like this you're really only casting resin with reinforced mashed bits. Additionally, in real carbon parts you orientate the fabrics to get perfect tension/compression in the direction of the loads, or use multiple orientations bonded together for good all-round strength, but this manufacture method would have randomly oriented fiber directions.
Most likely they would not be able to appreciate your comment.
At a sailmaker where I worked in NL we worked on laying carbon fiber manually and laminating it to make sails that had almost no stretch for race applications, your comment is spot on and exactly why this whole exercise is pointless. It's all about getting long strands of fiber along stress lines and to make them denser where the stress is highest, a pour like described in the article negates a whole pile of the advantages that carbon fiber has. But it's a lot more efficient than laying long fibers and it still uses the same material so it will be sold.
Not that I'd ever buy a supercar, but personally think the look of FC looks cheap compared to the woven carbon fiber.
> As the metal is shaped during the forging process, its internal grain deforms to follow the general shape of the part. As a result, the grain is continuous throughout the part, giving rise to a piece with improved strength characteristics
This process seems to be just casting. Why do they call it forging?
https://www.google.com/search?q=chinarello&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8...