My Carrera GT Experience...on the road and track!
As a prefix, I am a dedicated Porsche enthusiast and my favorite car is currently the CGT - in fact, my family has been on the preorder list for many months now. That being the case, I know quite a bit about the car (borderline obsessive ) and have read most of the published material about it including magazine reviews, books published by Porsche and other sources, etc.
Another note is that I am a member of my local Ferrari club - although not an owner many of the club members are my friends, and I do work for the cub including the production of a video movie based on an annual four day event held in New Orleans. This event, the French Quarter Classic, has become widely regarded as the most exclusive Ferrari event in the country, and as a result many fantastic and unique cars are in attendance every year. This year, one of those cars was a Carrera GT! (Florida car, GT silver w/ Terra Cotta interior) It was very difficult for me (as the director and producer of a movie about Ferraris) because I consistently found the lens of any camera I was operating drifting towards the Carrera GT...
On the first day of the event, we began as we usually do, with a police-escorted road rally to a race track about 80 miles from New Orleans. My job in this is to drive my car, outfitted with a special camera rigging and cameras, and film cars on the road at speed. This rig is custom fitted to my car and operates very well, but requires that the windows of my car be the whole way down. As the police were taking us to the interstate, I noticed that the Porsche was only a few cars ahead of me! I could see the LED brake lights and silver side of the car sticking out from a line of F355s, and my heart started pumping faster...I didn't know it was going to be on the road rally! As we got underway, I found that even though I was supposed to be driving a camera car and filming Ferraris, I was trying to catch the CGT so I could have a better look at it...unfortunately, for every one car I overtook, the CGT would overtake about five! After we got out of the city I began overtaking cars like a madman. I HAD to catch up. As we moved further out into the country, I could hear the car wailing in the distance, a quarter mile ahead of me...Even with the windows of my car down traveling 140MPH, I could STILL hear the Porsche about 1/4 mile ahead screaming down the highway! Finally, after about 30 minutes of wringing out the motor of my 300hp car, I caught up! The owner looked at my car and understood what was going on, so I motioned for him to fall in behind me so I could film the car. The rest of the ride to the track was wonderful, with the Carrera GT in front, behind, or at the side of me.
When we arrived at the track I had to spend quite a bit of time fulfilling my job as a cameraman, but briefly had the time to introduce myself to the owner and explain to him that I was part of the management filming the event. I told him I was very interested in the car, and although it was not a Ferrari (typically only Ferraris are allowed on the track at our event) I would very much appreciate a ride around the track. Towards the end of the day I got my wish. I grabbed my helmet, hopped in, and off we went...!
The race track outside of New Orleans is a 1.8 mile FIA-style road course. It is in Louisiana so there are no elevation changes, and the turns are all very tight and technical (1.8 miles, 14 turns). As we got out onto the straightaway I could immediately sense a lot of differences in this car compared to other supercars. One of my good friends in New Orleans is a Ferrari supercar owner - in fact, he owns all four of them. I have been in and out of the F50 and Enzo enough to draw comparisons, and even after all of the reading about the CGT I have done, I was very surprised. For starters, after reading all of the complaints about the clutch I would have thought it to be more jerky. The owner not only started the car flawlessly without any feathering of the clutch, but (when I asked him about it) remarked that he had only stalled the car a handful of times the entire time he owned it, most of them in bumper to bumper traffic. Ever gear shift made the entire time we went around the track was 100% fluid, like butter - which is also a good descriptor for the exhaust note, which reflected off the concrete barriers down the straightaway to produce the most amazing sound I have ever heard from a road-legal car.
I wish I could say that the ride in the CGT was the most exciting ride of my life, but the owner was not skilled enough to operate it as such on the race track. Many times I found myself wanting to reach over and show him the correct steering position to follow the line of the track, when to lift and when not to, how far into the braking zones he needed to go, etc. Once he did lose control of the car, but caught it very quickly, resulting in an interesting drift carried through a 60 degree right-hander.
In comparison to the super-ferraris I have been in, I like it quite a bit. It seems to me like a good combination of the F50 and the Enzo, with a Porsche feel. In my opinion, the F50 is as good as it gets for putting a racecar on the street. You get in and beyond the (very simple) dash cluster, you get...nothing. No radio, no extra junk, just you and the car. With the Enzo...not so much. There is so much embedded technology in the Enzo that it is initially more difficult to get your head around. In addition to the dash cluster, which includes a multifunction TFT display that cycles relevant information about which mode you are running the car in, the car takes hundreds of measurements per second to adjust the car for street driving, race driving, etc. The Porsche is right in the middle. The interior is calmer, the feel is more direct, and even though a lot of information is presented to you, it is not as much as the Enzo. I like the feel of the interior better. It does not give you the idea that you are riding or driving in a ridiculous super exotic car, as is the case in the Enzo where you see Carbon Fibre everywhere you look, red and black, flashy colors, air conditioning hoses, flashing and blinking lights, etc. Everything about the interior looks more solid and firm than in the Enzo. Touching my hands to the magnesium in the dash, I could feel it was very thin but very strong. It almost felt like it should dent if I pushed on it, but it did not.
As I was sitting and examining the interior, the owner suddenly said something, but I couldn't hear him through my helmet so I asked him to repeat. "LOOKS LIKE WE'RE GONNA HAVE OURSELVES A LITTLE RACE!" he shouted back at me. As we pulled onto the straightaway, an Enzo pulled up next to us...
to be continued!