8
Start of the working day, greeted by two GTOs and an F1 truck. The GTO nearest the camera is the one earmarked for us. The other one is for another magazine. The truck has an F1 briefing room in it, and also carries kit we’ll be using on the track later.
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Baarp, waap, raaar! V12 engine has been tweaked to develop 661bhp and makes an incredible noise – it’s eight decibels louder in the cockpit than the standard 599 and probably more from the outside. Note the brake heat outlet ducts behind the rear wheels.
Park her up on the street and see who notices. Answer: everybody. This is northern Italy and this is a GTO.
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After a road drive, we’re back to the track. See that rear diffuser? That helps double the downforce on the car, that does.
This is called Virtual Race Engineer. If you look closely, you can see the tyres, brakes and engine all have relevant boxes. The line below them says ‘warmup, go!, over’. Green is good to go. Blue is too cool. Red too hot. The car knows how to look after itself.
These guys know what you’re doing too. When we drove the car on the track, we had a radio link to an engineer and live telemetry beamed straight back to some screens.
So the traces, like gear, steering input, throttle input, speed, are all shown live. Nowhere to hide – any ‘moment’ or silly bit of driving was instantly spotted.
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