SSO's Garage - Ferrari, McLaren, & Porsche

[SSO]

SydneyBridge said:

Full piece

https://karenable.com/boutique-update/

I was accidentally at the launch of the De Tomaso and it looked absolutely stunning, shame it has gone a bit wrong

Read on another thread that GM has sold some of GMA so has some cash for fun things

GMA did sell off the EV division. They are well funded these days.

De Tomaso is pretty ugly

[WCZ]

very interesting! been waiting ages for the sgc customer car to arrive

[SSO]

WCZ said:

very interesting! been waiting ages for the sgc customer car to arrive

Its getting very close

[SSO]

Just did a few updates on the F40 including a ceramic brake upgrade and alloy tanks. Car is running brilliantly and now it even stops when requested.

[dom9]

Would be very interested in hearing more about the ceramic brake upgrade on the F40!

[SSO]

dom9 said:

Would be very interested in hearing more about the ceramic brake upgrade on the F40!

I sourced them from DK Engineering. Just finished a write up on the brakes and alloy tanks.

[SSO]

Here's my petrolhead holiday gift guide:

The SSO Holiday Gift Guide

Figuring out what to get a loved one for the holiday season can be a daunting task. In our family, it’s a never ending string of text messages and emails asking the same “what do you want for Christmas?” It only stops when some ideas are finally coughed up, half the time in a fit of desperation, just to get the nagging to end. To try and help my fellow petrolheads, this year I’ve pulled together a few ideas across different price points. Starting from free and ending at a couple of million:

Under $100
A year’s subscription to Road Rat Magazine. (Road Rat Subscriptions) Road Rat is no ordinary car magazine. It is published 4 times a year. Each edition is beautifully written, the articles deeply researched, and its exquisitely crafted.

Chris Harris’ 1st book: Variable Valve Timings: Memoirs of a car tragic. (Variable Valve Timings). Before he became a TV Presenter and petrolhead icon, Chris was a well-respected journalist whose honesty got him banned by Ferrari. However,I have heard that Chris’ true claim to fame is that he served for several years as the number 3 driver for the British motor racing team, Garage 59..

McLaren: The Road Cars 2010-2024 by Kyle Fortune. (McLaren: The Road Cars) The book is now available for pre-order and will ship in Jan 2024. It promised to be the definitive history of McLaren Automotive. The forward is by Jay Leno.

If you have forked out $2k+ for that Maranello carbon fiber drink holder, then you need the right travel mug to go in it. The Yeti Travel Mug gets top karenable ratings (Yeti Travel Mug).

A CTEK battery conditioner (CTEK). Since we started keeping all of our cars on CTEK battery conditioners whenever they are in the garage, we haven’t had a single battery or electrical issue. They are brilliant.

$200-$500
The Escort Max 360 Radar Detector (Max 360). Sometimes your right foot just slips a little and an Escort Max 360 will help keep you out of potentially expensive trouble.

$500-$1,000
The Car Shoe was the original driving shoe and is my favorite. They are beautifully crafted, very comfortable, and wear well. They have two stores in Italy and can be ordered on-line (www.carshoe.com).

$1,000-$5,000
A pair of ticket to The Quail, A Motorsport Gathering (The Quail). It is the ultimate automotive food and champagne festival and Mrs. SSO’s favorite automotive related event.

$5,000-$10,000
A Loro Piana Roadster Jacket. (Roadster Jacket) Created to celebrate the 75th Anniversary of the Concorso d’Eleganza di Villa d’Este on Lake Como. It’s beautiful tailored out of the world’s finest cashmere.

$10,000-$25,000
Pure McLaren Artic Experience (Pure McLaren Artic). This should be in every supercar owner’s bucket list. Now if I could only convince McLaren to hold an ice driving experience on a frozen lake in Montana.

A Podium 1 Racing P2 Sim Rig (Podium 1 Sim). Podium 1 builds about the best racing sim rigs on the market and the P2 rig is a great balance between cost and performance.

$25,000-$50,000
For the Ferrari F40 owner in your life, nothing says I love you more than a set of ceramic brakes from DK Engineering. (F40 Ceramic Brakes). They are spectacular and utterly transform the F40’s stopping ability.

$50,000-$100,000
The full Ferrari Corso Pilota Program (Corso Pilota) starting with “Sport” and ending with “Race”. Ferrari does these sorts of programs brilliantly. For a Ferrari owner, this is an experience that will both enhance your skills and provide a lifetime of memories.

$100,000-$500,000
A McLaren 750S Spider (750S Spider). This is likely the last non-hybrid production series supercar from McLaren and it may just be the best. While the order book is growing on the 750S, I believe there are a few late 2024 build slots still available.

$500,000-$1,000,000
A Glickenhaus SCG 004S or a 004CS (SCG 004) It’s a fully US road legal 3 seater with a center driving position. Toss in a full Carbon fiber chassis and you have what is likely to be the ultimate American made supercar. If that isn’t appealing enough, the “S” comes with a manual 6 speed transmission.

$1,000,000 and up
While the boat has long sailed on the GMA T.50, I have heard there might be a few build slots for GMA’s next car, the T.33 Spider still available (T.33 Spider). If the T.33 turns out to be even half as good as the T.50 is reported to be (see: La Source: T.50 vs. McLaren F1) it will be epic.

I’ve been quite impressed with the development of the Praga Bohema (Bohema). It has potential to be the best of the current series of track focused hypercars. Praga will only produce 89 Bohemas with deliveries starting in 2024. Like the T.33 Spider, from what I have heard, there are still a few build slots available.

Free
A subscription to karenable. Just send the recipients email address to the SSO email listed on the site and they will get a notification every time a new article is posted. This is even better value for money than a Ferrari Carbon Fiber drink holder.

Also in the free category, sign up for the Sunday Drive Newsletter. It’s put out by the team behind the Stuttgart Market Letter and goes a great job of capturing interesting motoring content from the past week.

I hope this list is at least semi-entertaining and moderately useful. Good luck with the Holiday shopping.

Edited by SSO on Wednesday 6th December 14:41

[samoht]

Hey thanks, I appreciate your SSO Holiday Gift Guide - I was wanting something like the McLaren book and hadn't spotted that one coming up. Most of the rest is (well) beyond my budget but still good to read. I've asked Santa nicely for a T.33 Spider

[SSO]

samoht said:

Hey thanks, I appreciate your SSO Holiday Gift Guide - I was wanting something like the McLaren book and hadn't spotted that one coming up. Most of the rest is (well) beyond my budget but still good to read. I've asked Santa nicely for a T.33 Spider

Much appreciated

[mikebradford]

Nice list

[SSO]

Here's a few from my 2023 SSO Awards List:

Julius Ceasar Veni Vidi Vici Award goes to Max Verstappen naturally. Max completed dominated F1 this past season, winning 19 of 22 races and walking away with the championship. His teammate, Sergio Perez came in 2nd, only won 2 races while finishing with less than half of Verstappen’s points in an identical car. There hasn’t been a fight this lopsided since the US invaded Grenada.

The Midas Touch Nugget goes to John Elkann, Executive Chairman of Ferrari & Chairman of Stellantis. In a year when most automobile manufacturers saw stock prices headed south or sideways, Ferrari & Stellantis’ combined market cap increased in 2023 by a $52.4 billion. This 2023 increase is just a bit more than Ford’s current total market cap of $49 billion.

The Whiplash Ribbon goes to Sergio Cruz. Poor underperforming Sergio has spent most of the 2nd half of the 2023 Formula 1 season looking over his shoulder trying to figure out if and when Daniel Riccardo will be replacing him at Red Bull.

The Battle of Teutoberg Forest Eagle goes to Ferrari F1 Team. Like the Roman Legions in the Teutoberg Forest, a series of blunders both in terms of race car development and on track strategy sunk Ferrari’s F1 Title hopes in 2023.

The Alchemist Award goes to McLaren’s F1 team for turning a race car that started the season off as essentially a lead brick into near podium gold by the middle of the season.

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it Trophy goes to Lawrence Stroll. Back in 2000, Stroll took over control of Asprey and Garrard (A Royal Mess). A&G then managed to burn through vast amounts of cash over a period of years, including opening a huge flagship store in New York City before Stroll & his partners sold their stake and exited the A&G business in March 2006. In 2020, Stroll took control of Aston Martin. In the years since, AML has managed to burn through vast amounts of cash and in June 2023, opened an ultra luxury flagship store in NYC (AML NYC Flagship Store).

The London Underground “Mind the Gap” Ribbon goes to Lance Stroll. In the same piece of machinery as Fernando Alonso, Lance Stroll managed to finish the 2023 F1 season with just 36% of the points scored by his teammate. However, as F1 leading member of the “lucky sperm club”, Stroll F1 seat for 2024 is probably the safest on the grid.

The Pastor Maldonado Cup goes to Logan Sargeant for running up a $4.3 million tab for crash damage in the 2023 F1 season. Filling out the podium are Carlos Sainz at $3.64 million and Sergio Perez with $3.22 million.

[SSO]

Here's the End of Term Report on our now former Porsche 911 (997.2) GT3 RS

After 7 years, it was time for our red eared Porsche 911 (997.2) GT3 RS to head to a new home. The GT3 RS was just the latest victim of our household rule that if you aren't getting driven regularly, you lose your garage space. In many ways though, the fact that the GT3 RS lasted 7 years is a testament to just how great a car it is. If you had asked me how long I expected we would have kept the GT3 RS when it first arrived, I would have guessed around 2 years. It had a good long run up until 2022. It was the arrival of the McLaren 765LT Spider that year that first put the GT3 RS's garage spot in jeopardy. It's the likely arrival of the SCG 004S later this year that finally cemented the decision.

How we ended up with the 911 (997.2) GT3 RS is a bit of a convoluted story. It really started off with a major misfire on trying to acquire a Porsche Carrera GT. This was back in June 2014. I had located a 2005 Black/Grey Carrera GT with 8,200 miles at Porsche of Newport Beach in California. We had agreed a price, I had offered to wire over a deposit (which I was told was not necessary) and I was just waiting for them to send over the pre-purchase inspection report before wiring payment. After three days and no signs of the PPI nor any response to my emails, I finally called the salesman back and was told they had sold the Carrera GT to another buyer. What made it even worse was the dealership manager wasn't even apologetic about the situation and basically told me to go pound sand. This basically put me off the Carrera GT option for several years.
All of this brings us back to the GT3 RS. With the CGT out as a short-term option, I started doing a bit of research on the various GT3 variants as I considered that to be the next best thing. A traditional manual gearbox was a must have which immediately ruled out the later 991.1 series. I also reached out for input from Nick Trott (former editor of EVO Magazine & MotorSport) who is both a die-hard Porsche fan and has forgotten more about the different 911 models than I will ever know. Originally, I had settled on 997.1 GT3 but after hearing multiple rave reviews of the 997.2 GT3 RS, I changed directions and decided that the rawer more focused car was a better fit to my personal tastes. The .2's also can be optioned with a front axle lift system, which in the area I live, is a necessity. The fact that the 997.2 GT3 RS also won EVO's car of the year in 2010 didn't hurt.
From final decision on model to finding the right car happened very quickly. It was four weeks from search start to deposit placed. I found the car via the Porsche pre-owned vehicle locator while sitting in a ski lodge exhausted at the end of a great day on the slopes. The GT3 RS had been listed the day before and I immediately placed a call to the dealer, Porsche of Beverly Hills, as soon as I saw the listing. A quick email exchange on the history of the car followed and the next day, New Year's Eve, a deposit was placed. Given the holidays, it took another couple of days to finalize the transaction but by the second week of January the GT3 RS was in route to the first of three different places it would live in our time together.. The positive experience with Porsche's Beverly Hills dealership could not have been more different from the disappointing mess on the Carrera GT at the Newport Beach dealership.

During the seven years of GT3 RS ownership, we have had several highly memorable trips together. The first one that comes to mind was a two day trip with my youngest son (aka – Bad Driver) when we drove a pair of Porsches from Dallas, to what would become their new home for several years, to Montana. Here's a short summary of that drive:


This year I drove the Porsche 911 (997.2) GT3 RS up while Bad Driver followed in the Porsche Cayenne S. In effect, these are the two extremes of the Porsche line up. The quick agile truck and the raw focused track weapon. Despite having owned the Cayenne S for 3 ½ and the GT3 RS for a year and a half, this was the first major long distant trip for both. While I had no concerns on how Bad Driver would hold up for 1,600 miles in the Cayenne, I was concerned with the beating I might be setting myself up for in the striped down GT3 RS. Little to no sound deadening, thinly padded racing buckets, and a suspension designed more for the Nurburgring Ring than the US Interstate Highway system is not a recipe for setting a new standard of comfort.
The trip started at 7:00 AM on Thursday morning. The targeted destination for day 1 was just north of Denver, a not insignificant 920 miles away. A further 680 miles would follow on day 2. This year we decided to take the longer way up through Oklahoma and then across via Kansas which would keep us on highways for almost the entire trip. This routing avoided the back roads and small towns in Texas & Colorado which slowed our progress considerably when we did a similar trip last year in the McLaren 675LT Spider. We were hoping the early-ish start would allow us to clear the Dallas before rush hour reached its peak and break out onto the open highway where more rapid progress could be made. Other than one minor accident related traffic jam, the plan worked well and we found ourselves crossing the Oklahoma border in good time. Our first, of what would be many, fuel stops came shortly afterwards. While the Cayenne sported a range of 450+ miles, getting 200 miles out of the GT3 RS's water bottle size tank was about the best we could do. By the time we stopped for the night, we had toured five gas station forecourts across three states with a further four stops following on day 2. On the plus side, it did give me the chance to get out of the GT3 RS about every 2 ½ hours to stretch my legs.
As a long-distance tourer, the GT3 RS is survivable. The seats and driving position are quite comfortable, the controls all well-arranged and intuitive, and the sightlines are excellent. The lack of sound-deadening coupled with the very firm suspension do cause a fair amount of brain and body damage over extended periods. While the sounds system is not too bad when stationary, once you get moving a speed it has plenty of competition from the rear of the car. Passing is almost too easy, drop down 2 gears, a bit of right foot and what was in front will now be firmly in the rearview mirror. Below 3000 rpms engine grunt is pretty ordinary, north of 4500 rpms the GT3 RS comes very much alive. This is a car that wants to be pushed hard and really driven. Cruising is just not its thing.

While day one was basically an uninspiring slog on dead straight concrete highways across the flatlands, day two was significantly more interesting. Once we crossed into Wyoming, the speed limit increased to 80 mph and the quality of the roads improved dramatically. While it doesn't have quite the fun factor of a mountain pass, the 350 miles up through Wyoming are about as good as it gets on a US Interstate. There is little to no traffic, the road is painted across the hills, and you have the Rocky Mountains to your west. If there ever was a stretch of highway in the US that an autobahn approach to speed limits should be applied to, it is this. Needless to say, we made rapid progress and the GT3 RS started to really come into its own. Crossing into Montana, the roads got even more interesting as the hills grew in size. For the first time in 1,220 miles, the gearbox started to get more of a work out as we powered up the hills and then down through fairly tight corners. After another rapidly covered 250 miles, we were finally off the highway and headed up into the mountains. The final 50 miles were on what is becoming one of my favorite pieces of tarmac in the US. The two lanes of Route 191 are cut alongside the Gallatin River as it winds through a narrow valley with towering peaks on both sides. It is challenging, beautiful, and unforgiving if you get it wrong. As one of the key access routes to Yellowstone National Park, it also gets a fair amount of traffic which needs to be navigated in tight passing zones that are few and far between.

While on the highway, the Cayenne S had little trouble keeping pace with the GT3 RS, however I lost "Bad Driver" almost immediately as soon as we headed into the mountains. This was not unexpected as his last words to me at our final gas station stop were "I will see you at the house". Here the GT3 RS was completely in its element, the brain and body damage of 1,200 miles on the highway were washed away and quickly forgotten. The more you push it, the better the GT3 RS gets. Hands and feet were plenty busy working the gearbox, navigating the corners, and dispatching slower moving traffic. As my daily driver is a mid-engined car, the difference in weight distribution on the GT3 RS was quite discernable. The fact that the engine is hanging off the rear axle is definitely noticeable, as is the more pronounced weight transfer when you mash the middle pedal. If you want to keep the horizon in front of you, corners are definitely slow in, fast out.

After 1600 miles and twice that in dead bugs, we arrived at our destination. Over the course of two days, I finally really bonded with the GT3 RS. In the last several hundred miles, I really started understanding the depths of its abilities. Subsequent drives up through the mountains in the days that followed further deepened my appreciation of what Porsche created with the GT3 RS. It's a car that is now up in an environment where it can really shine.


As a car to own, from a maintenance cost perspective, the GT3 RS was quite reasonable for a sportscar in its class. The only major unpleasant surprise came shortly after we acquired the GT3 RS. It turned out that the power steering line was leaking, which doesn't sound like a big deal, until you find out that the engine needs to be pulled to change the line. While not quite as hard on the wallet as pulling an engine on a Ferrari F355, it was still a quite unpleasant surprise. The rest of the annual services were all in the $800-$1,500 range with the only other significant expense being a set of new tires in early 2023. Overall GT3 RS ownership was remarkably drama free.

I do miss the 911 (997.2) GT3 RS now that it is gone. It was always such an engaging car to drive. I loved the raw uncompromised focus of the GT3 RS but at the same time, that also was the cars Achilles heal. While it was great to take on a blast up a mountain road for an hour or two, it was far too raw to ever get the nod for a weekend road trip with Mrs. SSO. With it being relegated to a point A to point A car, it really was only a matter of time until its "Use Case" expired with the result being it just wasn't getting the regular use it needs over the last year and a bit. Hopefully it has now found a new home where it will be both appreciated and driven with vigor regularly.

Edited by SSO on Monday 29th April 17:56

[mikebradford]

I really enjoy your in depth story's, feels like I'm partially experiencing the car.

[Dr G]

I enjoyed the writeup - thanks

[Still Mulling]

Thanks for sharing an enjoyable write-up, SSO. Glad you enjoyed your ownership period!

[SSO]

mikebradford said:

I really enjoy your in depth story's, feels like I'm partially experiencing the car.

Glad you enjoyed it !

[WCZ]

good read that!
any news on the sgc?

[SSO]

WCZ said:

good read that!
any news on the sgc?

Thanks. On SCG, think they are in final development testing.