The Man in the White Suit_ The Stig, Le Mans, The Fast Lane and Me - Ben Collins [134]
Many of us brought our families out and I was joined by my very own Bond girls. With breakfast under the canopy of a fine restaurant and the water lapping at our feet, Georgie and I found Garda life very appealing. Our baby girl nodded off with the occasional point and shriek of ‘Ca’ – short for car in my book, but Georgie insisted she meant ‘cat’. The unforgettable scenery, sharp company and Italian glamour made ‘work’ seem like a holiday.
Balancing multiple high-octane roles was challenging in every sense. Above all, experiencing such a variety of cutting-edge machinery was the spice of life. Top Gear needed me to return to England to film a ‘Scud’, the Ferrari 430 Scuderia. Ferrari only had it in the UK for one day and Wilman was adamant that I got on a plane.
The Scuderia edition was the super-light, super-sporting, weapons-grade version of the mid-engined Ferrari 430, itself a balanced demi-god. It was the kind of tool that founder Enzo Ferrari first set up his factory to build: uncompromising engineering excellence.
The Scud was epic. It was stripped of all but the basic functions and the weight reduction spent the horsepower all the better around the track. The soft leather wheel was chunky to grip. A flick of a dial to ‘race’ mode denied any electronic traction interference and upgraded the paddle gear-shift from stun to kill. Each staccato crack beckoned the next gear in just sixty milliseconds.
Schumacher had a hand in the development process that had begun with the original mid-engined Dino in 1970, before passing through the 308 to the 355, and the 430 was the ground-breaking result.
Within a lap I recognised that no supercar had ever held this level of mechanical front grip. It gave such phenomenal feedback through the steering that you felt every movement of the tyre. It was as if the car knew where you wanted it to go before you did.
There was no time to chew the fat with Ferrari before I sprinted back to the airport and returned to Italy. Just enough to say their car was magnificent and had we been on fresh tyres, rather than a set pre-digested by Clarkson, the lap time would have been much faster.
Subsequently, I tested the Ferrari 458 and for a nano-second was beguiled by its voluptuous styling into believing it was better than the Scud. But you can’t improve on perfection, and certainly not by replacing a vital organ like the handbrake with a push-button fuse. That really only left the Scud with one rival for the mantle of Uber-Coupe.
The Aston Martin DBS was one of the most sophisticated machines on the market, perhaps the best all-round sports car ever built. Its graceful curves kept its brute performance covert; beneath the mature exterior was a recalcitrant wild child. It boasted six litres of devilish horsepower, totalling over 500bhp. The V12 engine responded to every millimetre of movement in the throttle, like an F1 car. It howled on full song but reduced to a whispering burble at low revs. The ceramic brakes clamped like vices but with such sensitivity that you could modulate them at the limit of grip from its fat tyres.
There was scarcely any visible difference between the DB9 and the DBS, yet the slightly lowered, delicately enhanced suspension turned the girl next door into a supermodel. Beneath her hemline, the heightened technology of the braking and traction control systems was streets ahead. Where most anti-skid systems prevented the tyre from getting anywhere near to locking during braking, the Aston’s onboard computer took it to the limit several times a second and you sensed its work underfoot.
The traction control was equally aggressive on acceleration. You could leave it turned on, stamp the right pedal with a mere modicum of ability and impress your friends without decapitating them.
The scooped bucket seats wrapped around your kidneys, forging man with machine. Ergonomically, the driving position