(Thanks for the tip Dave) (TwitPic)

What really happened was—well, nobody knows. This photo was posted on A Time To Get, along with a number of similar ones, and the only explanation is this:

A couple highlight pics from the trip just because. What better way to get down on a Monday than with some beat-up old hood badges of multi-million dollar rides and a little reckless driving on the Autostrada?

What’s beyond certain is that Nick Maggio had a killer time.

Photo Credit: A Time To Get

The true answer may never be known, but watching a wrecker pull the water-logged remains of a once beautiful and fish free Ferrari F430 from the drink makes us pucker just a little bit. Aside from the tensed reaction, it makes us wonder why in the world you'd let your pride and joy sit at the bottom of the lake for a week. Why weren't the cops involved? What about his insurance?

These are all very obvious questions that just don't seem to be answered in this clip, so we invite you to formulate your own creative epic tale in the comments below. And please, have fun with it. (H/T To Eggwich!) [TheDirty]

Observe fast cars from the vantage point of the average automobile and anything with more than four cylinders and 200 HP will merge with their kin like railway sleepers on the horizon.

Because can there possibly be a difference between, say, a BMW 335i with six cylinders and three hundred horsepower and a Ferrari F430, where the respective numbers are eight and 490? They will both rip your head clean off upon a blip of the throttle and will both exceed legal speed in a matter of seconds.

Yet up close, the differences grow. My friend Gergely Antal has recently spent some time in a gray F430 Spider and he has emerged a different man:

Look, I don’t edit a fancy motoring magazine, I don’t drive race cars for a living, I am not a petrolhead. Still, I’m familiar with what a 300 HP car feels like [the BMW 335i you can see here – Ed.] and have even picked up a set of wheels for Xbox driving games. I don’t throw common sense out the window when I evaluate things, even if this is not always apparent—but this car is so much more than I’d believed. I was thinking maybe it’s twice as good as the 335i. But no: it’s like ten times as good.

This is what stepping on the slippery slope of supercars is like. When you realize that beyond the numbers are innumerable details. That an engine which is perhaps twice as powerful is also twice as responsive in raising and dropping revs. That its power flows through a gearbox twice as precise, through a suspension that follows the road surface like a silken glove, through tires—and I’ll have to quote Neal Stephenson here—“with contact patches the size of a fat lady’s thighs.” Add them all and quantitative differences emerge.

And don’t think that it’s regular cars on one side and supercars on the other. The F430 may be the inflection point on the way there, but the slide from an F430 to a Ferrari 599 GTB is just as steep, according to Nino Karotta, who has driven both. At the bottom of the slope stands Harry Metcalfe, managing director of Evo magazine, who has once paid Horatio Pagani a quarter million dollars to upgrade his Pagani Zonda C12 to F spec—and he called it money well spent.

So please, for the sake of your comfortable retirement and your children’s nutrition and higher education, avoid Ferraris like the plague. Look what’s happened to Gergely—a reasonable man, an engineer by training—barely a day after his experience with Maranello’s gateway drug:

I have now made the decision to not get old or die without having once owned a Ferrari. You do need goals to keep you moving.

Junkie talk!

Photo Credit: Andras Horvath

Press release:

Some Like It Even Hotter: NOVITEC ROSSO Tunes the Ferrari Scuderia Spider 16M — 696 hp / 512 kW, 682 Nm and More than 330 km/h

How can you make a Ferrari Scuderia Spider 16M, built in a limited edition of just 499 vehicles, even more exciting and more exclusive? Easy, just take it to NOVITEC ROSSO, the world's leading refiner of the sports cars from Maranello.

There the open-top lightweight model is fitted with the NOVITEC ROSSO RACE Bi-Compressor engine with 696 hp / 512 kW. It propels the Ferrari to a new top speed of more than 330 km/h. Numerous uncompromising sporty options such as 20-inch wheels, sport springs, a lift system for the front axle and exterior and interior accessories round out the product lineup.

NOVITEC ROSSO compressor technology has been the proven recipe for added driving fun for many years. For the eight-cylinder four-valve engine of the Scuderia Spider 16M NOVITEC ROSSO has now developed a custom version of its RACE Bi-Compressor engine.

The 4.3-liter V8 is supercharged by two cogged-belt-driven high-performance compressors with a maximum boost pressure of 0.48 bar. Each cylinder bank is fitted with a generously dimensioned water-to-air intercooler.

A specially manufactured heat-insulated intake manifold with larger cross-sections provides the engine with pre-compressed air. High-performance air filters and larger injectors round out the engine conversion on the intake side.

For a perfect symbiosis of maximum power yield, exemplary running smoothness and durability beyond reproach, the NOVITEC ROSSO engine specialists precision-match the new components with a newly programmed electronic engine management system.

Just as important are the larger cooling circuits for water and oil as well as dedicated cooling circuits for both compressors and the intercoolers.

The extensive NOVITEC ROSSO RACE Bi-Compressor conversion, available for 47,000 Euros for this and all other F430 Spider models, offers unique performance. With a power output of 696 hp / 512 kW at 8,400 rpm the NOVITEC ROSSO conversion surpasses the production engine by 186 hp / 136.9 kW. Peak torque grows from standard 470 Nm to 682 Nm at 6,300 rpm.
Driving performance improves just as impressively: The tuned Scuderia Spider 16M sprints from rest to 100 km/h in just 3.5 seconds, and reaches 200 km/h after just 9.7 seconds. The 300-km/h barrier is shattered after just 23.8 seconds. Top speed for the open-top mid-engine sports car increases from 315 to more than 330 km/h.

For further optimized handling of the lightweight sports car NOVITEC ROSSO offers an update from the standard 19-inch tires to three-piece 20-inch wheels. The NOVITEC ROSSO NF3 double-spoke wheels in size 8.5Jx20 in front and in size 12Jx20 in back widen the track and thus allow even higher cornering speeds. The custom-tailored high-performance tires in size 235/30 ZR 20 in front and in size 325/25 ZR 20 on the rear axle are provided by technology partner PIRELLI.

NOVITEC ROSSO sport springs lower the center of gravity and further improve agile handling. For added daily utility of the Scuderia Spider 16M NOVITEC ROSSO offers a hydraulic lift system for the front axle. At the push of a button the front is raised by 40 millimeters and makes navigating obstacles such as curbs, speed bumps and garage entries easier. The front axle reverts to normal position at a second push of the button or automatically once the car reaches a speed of 80 km/h.

To give the Spider exterior an even more striking appearance NOVITEC ROSSO offers blacks taillights, side markers and reflectors.

The lightweight-construction interior can be refined with exclusive NOVITEC ROSSO options as well. The ergonomically shaped leather/carbon-fiber NOVITEC ROSSO sport steering wheel features a flattened lower rim for easier entering and exiting. The NOVITEC ROSSO carbon-fiber shift paddles are longer than their production counterparts and make manual gearshifts of the F1-SuperFast2 transmission even easier.

Special interior color requests can be fulfilled by NOVITEC ROSSO in any imaginable color combination.

We've seen early prototypes wearing F430 skin, we've seen blurry shots of the F450 from afar, we've seen speculative illustrations and we've heard the new 4.5-liter V8 wail at the Fiorano test track, but we've never seen shots like these thanks to the James Bond-esque photographers at CzechFerrari.cz. For the first time ever, we get a clear view of the new engine, braking system, suspension, interior and of course the new aerodynamically controversial body design. Take a peak through the gallery and form your opinion of the new mid-engined Ferrari below. [via CzechFerrari, Teamspeed]

[via Autocar]

We’re sitting at a vast dining table, my friend Máté and I, idly racing a toy Ferrari in the shadow of salmon sandwiches, and he says, hey, let’s turn that Ferrari into a Mad Max Interceptor Pursuit Special.

The Ferrari is an F430 Challenge, sans Stradale, the racing version of the basic F430, and you can get one at Shell gas stations with your purchase of gasoline (and candy bars), at least here in Europe you can. It’s palm-sized and comes with a pullback motor which is synched with a speaker emitting a rather faithful engine noise. I know because I have a 250 GTO and the sound is vastly different, modern flat-plane V8 versus vintage racing 3.0-liter V12.

We’ll skip the hood-mounted supercharger as there’s nothing to supercharge up front, same with the sidepipes and the ghetto black paintjob, but we can’t skip the tanks. On the original Pursuit Special, the tanks stored scarce gasoline, a substance which is indeed getting scarce but which unfortunately does not come in tiny canisters.

What does come in tiny canisters is nitrous oxide, the mother of all dual-use technology, used in dentistry for anaesthesia, in car tuning for, well, you know what, and in the kitchen to make whipped cream. Nitrous oxide is extremely soluble in fat, as in the fat of whipping cream, enabling the user to create whipped cream twice the volume than with air.

Nitrous oxide in cars is usually labelled NOS after Holley Performance Products’ Nitrous Oxide Systems but my mother is a chemical engineer and she would disapprove of that, so we’ll go with the chemical formula N₂0. With a dab of overhead marker and a strip of Scotch tape, the car is ready to rock and roll.

Ready, I lied, but not quite. The heavy N₂0 canisters are overloading the pullback motor, making the car extremely sluggish. And you can’t have an F430 Challenge Interceptor Pursuit Special associated in any way with that dreadful adjective. What we’ll need is an ultra-precise double-barreled nailgun which fires two pins in high sync to rupture both nitrous canisters at the same time, creating in the process a nitrous-powered jet car.

If you have such a nail-gun handy, Jalopnik Nitrous Initiative would like to hear from you.

Photo Credit: Máté Petrány and the author

We're beginning to wonder. Early Monday morning a stunt driver lost control of his Ferrari F430 while filming a chase scene and injured two. The X5's driver, one Laura Conti, claims she was attempting to avoid a stray taxi cab and ended up hitting a parked car, which sent her onto the curb. Nobody was seriously injured, thankfully. Perhaps a wizard with stronger magic than Cage's is trying to prevent this silly film from seeing the light of day. [NBC, 1010Wins]

The incident was captured on amateur video and shows two cars weaving through NYC traffic before the stunt driver of the Ferrari lost control on the wet streets and jumped the curb, crashing into a Sbarro's. The car struck a pedestrian directly and knocked down an electrical post which fell onto another. The worst part? One of the victims was not associated with the film so that'll be a nice lawsuit. Both were taken to Bellevue Hospital where their injuries are considered not life threatening. Thank goodness, especially as we laughed at the guy flailing his arms and legs underneath the electrical pole. We feel much less like horrible human beings now.
In other news "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" is based on the poem which inspired the Disney classic "Fantasia" and puts Nicolas Cage in the role of a sorcerer named Balthazar Blake who's scouring New York City for an apprentice. Yes, it absolutely sounds as stupid to us as it does to you. [New York Post]

It happens like clockwork, the weather warms in the northern hemisphere and everyone hauls out dusty super cars, giddily hot-rodding them and inevitably planting a couple into something hard, add youthful stupidity to the mix and it's practically guaranteed. The two teenage sons of Russian bankers were lighting up Moscow streets at speeds topping 125 MPH when they lost control and smashed into the back end of a Range Rover. There were surprisingly no serious injuries in the Rover and no bystanders were hurt, but the two had to be cut from the car and taken to an area hospital where they're expected to make a full recovery. And by full recovery we mean learn nothing, guilt their dad's into buying even more exotic cars, and then smash those up during drunken, late-night escapades. [KP.ru (translated), English Russia]

The company doesn't explicity say this vehicle is based on the F430 but, even with the substantial reworking of the body with carbon fiber and aluminum, it's clear to anyone with eyes it's a Ferrari. Power comes from a 4.4-liter V8 with two superchargers, propelling this mean piece of orange sherbet to 62 MPH in 3.4 seconds. We're waiting to see an actual version of the car before we make a full judgment of the Luca Serafini Stile design, but with only 11 models being produced we expect it's a bit too pricey to end up in our garage.

The World's Most Exclusive High-End Sports Car: The NOVITEC TuLesto with 777 hp and a Top Speed of More than 350 km/h

There are many fascinating automobiles money can buy but its spectacular design, its uncompromising high-performance concept and its limited edition of just eleven cars make the new NOVITEC TuLesto the most exclusive high-end sports car in the world.

The mid-engine racer is 204 centimeters wide and weighs in at just 1,260 kilograms. It is built by German automobile manufacturer NOVITEC in Stetten in Bavaria. At the heart of the two-seater is a V8 engine with dual superchargers and a rated power output of 777 hp / 571.8 kW. Thanks to its carbon fiber and aluminum construction the coupe has an excellent power-to-weight ratio of just 1.62 kg/hp. The result is driving performance that only very few super sports cars can match: The sprint from rest to 100 km/h takes less than 3.4 seconds, and the NOVITEC TuLesto reaches 300 km/h after just 22.6 seconds. Top speed is more than 350 km/h.

The new high-end sports car represents NOVITEC's first proprietary car and marks the company's 20th anniversary. "With the NOVITEC TuLesto we transform our collective know-how from two decades of automobile tuning into an uncompromising high-performance sports car for eleven of our long-time customers from around the world," says NOVITEC managing director Wolfgang Hagedorn. "The TuLesto offers an optimal symbiosis of exceptional driving dynamics and exciting yet aerodynamically efficient styling."

Light-weight construction was one of the main goals from the very start of the project. The designers' materials of choice are normally found in racecars. The chassis and the integrated safety cell are made entirely from aluminum, making them extremely light while at the same time giving them extraordinary rigidity.

The striking design of the sports car is the result of a cooperation between NOVITEC and the Italian design studio Luca Serafini Stile in Modena. The unmistakable shape of the TuLesto was created using state-of-the-art CAD and CFD technologies, further augmented by the use of the wind tunnel. The TuLesto is 462 centimeters long, 204 centimeters wide and has a height of 122 centimeters.

The spectacular curves of the fenders, the front apron, the shape of the rear and the smooth underbody with integrated venturi tunnel and diffuser were calibrated in the wind tunnel to create an optimal aerodynamic balance.

For perfect weight distribution the NOVITEC TuLesto was designed with a classic mid-engine layout. The 4.4-liter four-valve V8 engine with dual superchargers is installed directly behind the cockpit. The high-tech engine produces a maximum power output of 777 hp / 571.8 kW at 8,200 rpm and a peak torque of 727 Nm at 6,300 rpm.

Motorsports was also the inspiration for the power transfer: The six gears of the semi-automatic gearbox with integrated anti-slip differential are shifted with carbon-fiber paddles behind the steering wheel. An adjustable traction control system with launch control for perfect starts guarantees maximum driving safety on the road and on the track.

The NOVITEC engineers and technicians also used racing technology on the suspension: As in GT-series racing, the TuLesto features double-wishbone suspension front and rear, height-adjustable struts with various selectable damping rates, and adjustable sway bars. For easy negotiating of underground parking ramps or similar obstacles the TuLesto front can be raised four centimeters at the push of a button. The anti-lock braking system features ceramic composite discs and six-piston fixed calipers front and back for maximum stopping power and endurance.

Another elementary contribution to the superior driving dynamics of the NOVITEC TuLesto comes from its ultra-light light-alloy wheels with diameters of 20 or 21 inches. These wheels were custom-developed for this coupe and are fitted with semi slicks up to 355 millimeters wide on the rear axle.

The interior design has a decidedly sporty nature but also offers creature comforts such as a climate-control system and a high-end sound system. Lightweight carbon fiber plays a dominating role in the interior as well: It is used for dashboard, center console and door trim as well as for the bucket seats which will be custom-fitted in form, shape, size, color and upholstery to each of the eleven future owners.

The creation of the eleven Limited Edition NOVITEC TuLesto super sports cars can be viewed in a web special at www.TuLesto.com.

# # #

We knew the day would finally come when Planelopnik and Jalopnik would finally mix, but thanks to our boy Aaron, that day came sooner than we thought. Cha-ching!! Apparently the two Ferrari F430s and this Maserati Gran Turismo are being unloaded in Hong Kong for a local auto show. We say f&@k the economic crisis and it seems that we're not the only ones as evidenced by the image below. Do you think they get double the air miles for something like this?
[via Airliners]

“I took this shot today, looked at it, looked again…and nothing. All I know is that the grille is from a V8 Vantage.”

The Aston Martin lands in my inbox with an embarrassing thud. I have spent hundreds of working days in my life sucking up information about cars. Yet apart from the obviously Aston grille and the lamprey-like lines, the car is a blank page. But why the words, go look for yourself:

“I don’t have a clue,” is what I reply to my friend Máté’s illustrated letter.

My reply is not exactly true. I do have the faintest of clues, not enough to base a reply on, but enough to get started. A pattern is vaguely recognized.

As readers of Malcolm Gladwell’s first second book Blink will recall, after absorbing prodigious amounts of information, the mind is able—in situations related to the nature of said information—to make quick decisions based on apparently very little input. This is how professional tennis players react to a serve too fast to interpret, how racing drivers can run competitive laps on an unfamiliar track and how an excellent friend of mine can look at a brownish spot in the sky a thousand feet away and say it’s a Black Kite. An old female, to be specific.

For some reason best left to future decades of neuroscience, cars styled by the Italian design consultancy Zagato are very easy to pattern-recognize even after limited exposure. And exposure is necessarily limited by the small number of Zagato cars on the road. One of the best known examples is Aston Martin’s DB4 GT Zagato of 1961. I have seen it exactly once, in Italy:

Zagato’s fluid yet butch lines stick to the brain like ground effect cars to the racing line. And while Máté’s Magic Mystery Aston had a whiff of Zagato about it, what it looked most like was a kit car.

Can’t be, he says. “I happened to photograph it on the most expensive street in the world,” and he directs me to the Wikipedia page of The Bishops Avenue in London.

Oh, that. The street you move to when you’ve made it, made it big, and you want the world to know about it. Zoned from a piece of land that used to belong to the Bishop of London, the Avenue has become a favorite spot of the nouveau riche, particularly if those nouveau riches have come from the likes of oil, guns and naked women. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1991, the House of Saud ruling neighboring Saudi Arabia snapped up ten of the Avenue’s 66 mansions. This is a street that used to be called Millionaire’s Mile, but which has lost that title to become Billionaire’s Boulevard. So yes, the Aston is probably real.

One of the residents of The Bishops Avenue is Hassanal Bolkiah, the Sultan of Brunei, and this is when you can sort of expect a light bulb to go off in the automotive brain—not mine, unfortunately—because you all know what Hassanal Bolkiah does with his tiny fiefdom’s oil riches: buys all the cars in the world and then some. Our very own guide to the cream of his crop will help you along with a gray F40, a Lamborghini LM002 safari wagon and five Dauer Porsches. The latter are street legal Le Mans race cars from the turbolicious Group C of the 1980s which accelerate like ballistic missiles all the way to 250 MPH.

A significant portion of Bolkiah’s fleet was not purchased but built, and alongside the Ferrari sedans and shooting brakes is a set of three Aston Martins from 1997 called the V8 Vantage Special Series I. They are based not on the current V8 Vantage but the bigger car with the same name produced in the 1990s and they look exactly like the DB4 GT Zagato of 1961, only bigger.

Apparently, the Sultan likes his supercars the 60s way. But coachbuilders are not exactly fond of reproducing earlier designs atop modern machinery. And through another flutter of Bolkiah’s bottomless wallet, the Zagato people got to work again on the V8 Vantage, operating this time not as the codex copiers of Mediaval Europe but as coachbuilders. What they came up with was the V8 Vantage Special Series II, a modern, very Zagato, thoroughly menacing Aston: the car Máté photographed.

Wicked performance is suggested by those curves and the Series II doesn’t disappoint: its 5.3-liter twin-supercharged V8 makes 600 HP and can launch the two-ton coupé to sixty in 4.4 seconds. The aerodynamic wall arrives at 205 MPH. Zagato built a total of three cars, two for Bolkiah, one for his brother Jefri.

This is where the story would normally end but just as Máté confirmed his haunch with a link to Supercars.net, Google unveiled Street View for London. I raced for a large screen, hooked it up to my Mac, and spent an hour and a half combing the length and breadth of The Bishops Lane to no avail. I found a lone Ferrari F430 but looking for custom-built Astons has a way of turning production Ferraris into Crown Victorias.

But then what did I expect? What’s the chance for a car built to thunder along motorways to sit in one place, waiting for both the Street View Opel and Máté to amble by? Before giving up entirely, Máté went for a last look. Parked on the driveway, obscured by a lamppost and fecund foliage, he found our car at last:

So on to you now, Street View ornithologists. Descend on London and dig for cars with stories. And yes, I want my photo of the TVR Cerbera Speed 12.

Photo Credit: Máté Petrány (V8 Vantage Special II), Larry Parker (DB4 GT Zagato), 2007 Tony Murray Photography/AFP/Getty Images (Toprak Mansion interior), AstonMartin.com (V8 Vantage Special I)

The photos below feature Premier4509's latest body kit, this time modifying the soon-to-be-replaced Ferrari F430. They've replaced the front and rear fascias with some aggressively designed sculpture with a bit of 430 Scuderia-like style and also given the cooling duct on the side a bit of Lamborghini LP640-like design cues. According to the talented guys at Premier, all pieces shown in black will in fact be hand-laid carbon fiber bits while everything else will be laid in fiberglass.

Not only will the Premier4509 receive a tastefully agrol body kit, it'll also feature a lowered, sportier stance while perched on a new set of shiny five-spoke alloys. Look for the kit to arrive around early June, right about when the economy turns its ugly head around (*crosses fingers). (Hat Tip To Ray!)

[via BadCopNoDonuts, Premier4509]

According to Next Autos, this F450 was undergoing some winter testing in Sweden. While it wears the skin of the vehicle it's replacing, the venerable F430, underneath is concealed a larger 4.5-liter V8 and the twin-clutch gearbox out of the Ferrari California.

As previously reported, the new F450 should debut sometime later this year and arrive in the hands of lucky Europeans early next year.

[Next Autos]

The rumor on the streets is the next-generation replacement for the Ferrari F430 would be called the Ferrari F450. Now, thanks to a knowledgeable and trustworthy source over on the FerrariChat forum, we're hearing the following:

430 replacement will be shown in October 09 with first Swiss and Euro cars Jan 2010 delivery, looks fabulous!

Sounds to us like either a Maranello or Tokyo reveal. (Hat tip to DJ Jazzy Kenneth!)

[via FerrariChat]