"Sleigh bells ring, are you listening?..." As I write this, the road outside my study window is blanketed with snow, and the only noise I can hear is that peculiar sound of silence that descends on the countryside after a heavy snow fall.
Mind you, I should think some of my neighbours welcome the peace and quiet. Not so long ago, everyone within half a mile of my house must have suffered a rude awakening several early mornings in a row as I fired up the 599 GTB Fiorano HGTE.
There is no way to do it quietly. Press the start button and within milliseconds the air is filled with the crackling growl of a 6.0-litre V12 engine anxious to get on with powering what is arguably the world's most desirable Gran Turismo sportscar.
For a little under £200,000 you can acquire the regular 599 (not quite so noisy) but for around £20,000 more you can go the whole hog and buy the HGTE version, which among other benefits, has an exhaust note tuned in the third and sixth harmonics to wake the dead.
Other advantages for the additional price of a middling-good Mondeo include lowered and stiffened suspension, a meatier rear roll-bar, and tweaked electronics, which speed up everything from gear changes to suspension reaction times. And there are a few body and cabin enhancements, too.
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an exhaust note tuned in the third and sixth harmonics to wake the dead |
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But given the stunning performance of the regular 599, and its race-car like handling, you might wonder what there was left to improve.
The secret is in the 'E' of HGTE. It stands for Evoluzione, and reflects the Ferrari ethos of continuous development and improvement. So, not content with the superlative 599 GTB, the company applied another layer of its F1 know-how to make sure that the best became even better. Most of the enhancements will mainly be appreciated on a race track - and some owners buy a Ferrari just for that purpose - but with extra performance comes added safety, and that works to everyone's advantage.
One of the challenges facing every performance-car designer is the so-called 'acceleration gap' - the time it takes to change up from one gear to the next. The introduction of automated manual boxes has speeded up the process way beyond the capabilities of even the most accomplished race driver using a manual 'box. Under full power, the 599 will swap cogs in 100 milliseconds, but the HGTE does the same thing in just 85 milliseconds. But you might wonder why Ferrari bothered - what can you do with 15 thousands of a second?
In human terms, not very much, I suppose, but the distance travelled in 100 milliseconds at 200 mph is equivalent to the length of a bus - during which time, thanks to the acceleration gap, there is no torque delivered to the driven wheels, so for some 30 feet control is lost. Reducing the acceleration gap - even by 15 per cent - therefore has positive safety advantages. And the Ferrari F1 engineers work in such minute time scales, and lend this expertise to the HGTE programme.
The 599 has magnetorheological active suspension, in which miniature 'iron filings' are held in suspension within the shock absorber oil. These iron filings respond to an electrical charge and change direction, making the fluid, in effect, more or less dense according to their orientation, and this in turn changes the stiffness of the shocker. Each shock absorber is connected to sensors that control the magnetorheological reaction, and each reacts independently of the others, so the Ferrari's active suspension is split four ways - one system for each wheel. And with the HGTE package, the response time is shortened - to just 10 milliseconds. The result is diminished body roll (the source of so-called secondary suspension), improved tyre contact, and sharper handling.
These little things become big things at high speed, and since most of the forces acting on a car vary with the square of the difference in speed, their effect is multiplied exponentially, and at 200 mph the little things don't seem so small after all.
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