With T10 back to the usual habit of trying to outdo themselves each month, and no end in sight for this onslaught of outrageous road vehicles and pure-bred racing legends, my pockets are really crying in fear of what's to come. Oh, well, money's made to be spent on shiny things, no? And this month's surprise pack really brings a lot of bang for your buck.
The BMW 3-Series Compact superseded, at the end of the 90s, the Alfa 75 as everybody's favorite
Touristenfahrten rocket. The reasons are simple: like Arese's finest, it is a relatively cheap car - especially on the used market - with an offering of relatively powerful engines which are spinning the
right wheels.
The first incarnation of the concept, based on the E36 platform, adopted a semi-trailing arm rear suspension straight out of the E30. While this was intended to allow for a lower trunk floor, it resulted in the car suffering - or benefitting, depending on your point of view - from an increase in oversteer. And the 323ti Sport, with its
M52 inline-6 engine, will easily accomodate for your desires of entering the corners looking out of the side windows rather than the windshield, and exiting them at full chatter. The Compact will manage sub-9 minutes Nurburgring laps... If just barely.
Sometimes you set out to create a car that's legendary amongst motorsport enthusiasts, and sometimes you just luck out. I wonder if its successor, the brilliant but somewhat sterile 1-Series, will be this popular twenty years from now?
The 695 Biposto is the ultimate evolution of the first-gen 500 Abarth - and it's just more of a good thing. None of the characteristics that make its more mundane brethen a motoring press darling's been changed; the go-kart handling and peppy engine are still there, but improved through the installation of a laundry list of trackday-spec parts that make this Biposto even more of a thrill-inducing ride. The weird thing? The new exhaust system - which does a great job at enhancing the turbo four-banger's blurb - is
an Akrapovic. Abarth started as an exhaust parts manufacturer. How ironic.
Now, don't get me wrong: the Cadillac CTS-V is a great car. After all, how can you go wrong with the recipe of taking a good chassis and adding more power and torque until you can essentially powerslide it in 5th gear?
However, looking at such a car and seeing it branded as a Cadillac leaves me more than a bit confused. Because in my mind - and in the mind of many others, I have no doubt - this brand is synonymous with gargantuan luxury cars good for highways and long hauls, not with Autobahn rockets good for the middle-aged hooner; and the lack of any recent motorsport history other than a couple of pathetic attempts at Le Mans and partecipation to the Pirelli World Challenge doesn't really help with Cadillac's case as a maker of performance vehicles. I am not sure what game GM is playing, when Cadillac has the flame-spitting, Nurburgring-record-setting, quarter-mile-burning sedans, while Pontiac is dead and the
Buick Regal nameplate is attached to the front-wheel-drive Opel Insigna...
I was expecting T10 to add a 60s Ferrari F1 at some point; maybe it shouldn't come as a surprise that they've choosen the 158, which was successfully campaigned by the Scuderia (and NART) in the 1964 season, netting John Surtees his only World Championship.
The first design penned by Mauro Forghieri, the 158 was in many similar to the revolutionary and game-changing Lotus 25 which had sent the 156 into retirement, in that it was powered by a 1500cc V8 engine which was riveted to the rear end of the front tub to act as a stressing member of the chassis. The switch to an eight-cylinder vee engine - the first in the history of the Prancing Horse brand - was a daring move, which however paid dividends.
Compared to the later 3-litre F1 cars, the 158 is much, much slower, having the performance of the era's F2 cars. And yet, it is such a joyful ride - less power and weight meaning that you'll really have to use your momentum and trailbraking to not suffer the tremendous understeer caused by the comically exagerated staggered wheel setup. It is such a pure ride, it's impossible to not fall in love with it! And the sound of the tiny V8 surely helps making it such a thrill.
While John Surtees was winning the 1964 F1 championship in the 158, on the other side of the Atlantic, one A.J. Foyt was dominating the USAC Champ Car season in this Watson roadster, powered by the venerable inline-4 Offenhauser engine. And compared to its European brethen, it looks downright
primitive.
But this was to be the last front-engined Indy car to be campaigned successfully - the progressively more intensive involvement of Ford and the invasion of sponsors and wealthy team owners spurred a technological race that would bring the USAC circus to become, in the span of a scant few years, one of the most technologically-advanced competitions on Earth.
The Sheraton-Thompson Special is a challenging car that actually requires you to slow down for the banked corners of Indianapolis: it is not an experience for the faint of heart, and to drive it fast, it requires a far more methodical approach than its more modern brethen, such as Andretti's STP Oil Treatment Special added in last month.
This Datsun 280ZX comes straight from the era of extreme Special Production Cars - which often wore the skin of humble road-going cars over a purpose-built tube-frame chassis, and featured dramatic extensions over their original body shape to improve their aerodynamics, like elongated noses, boxy fender flares, extended tails and additional rear windshields.
The 280ZX was built to IMSA GTX specifications and campaigned in the 1979 season by Bob Sharp's semi-official team, being driven - amongst all other - by Paul Newman. Despite its inability to challenge the dominance of the Porsche 935s, this car is no slouch. The inline-6 engine found in the road-going car and in the stock-derived GTU and GTO versions is gone, replaced by a turbocharged V8 unit - based on the
Y-series engine found in the JDM-only Nissan President - which somehow manages to mitigate what could be a monstrous turbo-lag with plenty of low-end naturally-aspired torque; and with no short supply of aerodynamic and mechanical grip, this definitive evolution of the racing
Z is guaranteed to dominate the track with absolute confidence. That is, until T10 finally decides to add the best and most famous car in the history of Group 5...
And finally we arrive to the star of this pack; the legendary Nissan R91CP, which joins an ever-growing stable of IMSA GTP and Group C vehicles from the early 90s.
Based on the R90, the drop-dead gorgeous blue, white and red car is your usual story of a Japanese heartbreak: it was definitely a car that could perform on the level of the all-dominating Sauber-Mercedes cars, but it was plagued by reliability problems and pure bad luck which prevented it from achieving more success in the World Sportscar Championship. The only consolation to a 1990 WSC season devoid of results was setting the record for the highest straightline speed in the Mulsanne straight reformed with the speed-sapping chicanes, in a pole-conquering qualification lap.
It fared much better in the IMSA GT series, however - becoming the first Japanese car to win the Daytona 24h in 1992, and estabilishing a slew of records in the process, that would go unbeaten as Group C regulations were eventually replaced by a more sensible ruleset. And the validity of its mechanical heart would be proved by McLaren's choice to morph it into their first self-developed powerplant - the
M838T which is found in all their current-production road cars.
Sadly, the mind-blowing top-speed of the R91CP isn't replicated in Forza - as many have already pointed out, the car struggles to reach 300kph. Hopefully a hotfix will correct what seems to be a mistake on T10 part... Until then, well, there's an absolutely firm grip on the tarmac and a fantastic engine sound to enjoy.
Surely they're the widest ones in the game.
