rojo5 escribió:Chulo el 348
,me gustaba mucho en su tiempo...a pesar que leí que (supuestamente) Montezemolo lo puso "a caldo" nada más volver a Ferrari. No se si algún forista de los que saben en el foro
me podría confirmar la noticia.
Un slaudo.
A mí me gusta cada día más...
Sí, es cierto lo de LCDM, aquí tienes el enlace:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sFozZd0jss Pero es uno de los gestos más absurdos y tontos de Luca BORREGO. Es de ser muy teatrero, falso e hipócrita acabar de llegar a una empresa y criticar todo lo actual para allanarte el camino y decir que tú lo vas a mejorar todo de ahora en adelante. Decir que todo se estaba hacienda mal, y que todo es una mierda... De hecho, unos años más tarde, el propio Borrego presentó en Los Ángeles el 348 Spider, y dijo que era el mejor Ferrari spider de toda la historia, el primero hecho bajo su tutela, etc... (ya ves la contradicción...). NUNCA perdonaré al Borrego de Luca este gesto.
Por favor, lee este hilo en otro foro...
http://www.forocoches.com/foro/showthread.php?t=3227437Rojo, también te recomiendo la lectura de este artículo en inglés que encontré por la red que, aunque es largo, está genial:
The Changing Fortunes of the Ferrari 348
Having lusted after a Ferrari ever since my father took me to a dealership at about the age of 7, I was finally in a position to make that dream a reality a couple of years ago. Although Enzo Ferrari famously once said “A Ferrari is a 12 cylinder car!” for me the mid engine V8s have always been my personal favourites and realistically I was looking at cars from the 308 up to the 355. As a teenager in the ‘80s when the Ferrari bug really first bit, I always liked the look of the ‘cheese graters’ found on the Testarossa and 348 and as I set out to find my car, the 348 was very much up towards the top of my list. As well as doing a fair amount of reading on each model I spoke to numerous Specialists who were more than happy to help an enthusiastic potential owner. One thing that came up time and again though was to avoid the 348 in favour of another model – sometimes a 328, sometimes a 355, but the theme was fairly consistent. A couple of the Specialists even told me that they tended to actively avoid the model in favour of others. This came as a bit of a blow as, if I was honest, having had a poster of one on my wall as a youth my heart had always been set on a 348 TS. Even though I valued the opinions I was being given I decided to look at all the models on my list.
It was at this point that I found a 348 that fit the bill regarding what I was looking for in this particular model - a later model TS in Rosso with cream leather, so I went for a test drive. I was hooked! What had been described to me as “iffy handling” felt alive, the feedback through the wheel was like nothing I had driven before. The whole car felt like it had a character found more in the older models yet with a bit of performance to back it up. And the sound was just sensational. Although I had listened to a lot of well meaning criticism of the model in my ‘research’ I realised that, for me, the 348 was the perfect blend of ‘old school’ Ferrari together with slightly more up to date performance that I was looking for. After an extensive search I found my car and haven’t regretted my decision for a moment.
So why did I constantly find criticism of the 348 during my search? Why was the model looked at by many as inferior to its immediate siblings? To answer that question you have to look a little at the history of the car. On its release the Ferrari 348 was hugely popular; it was extremely well received at Frankfurt when it was launched and at one stage there was a 5 year waiting list in the States with only slightly shorter order times over in the UK. In launching the 348, Ferrari had bought many of the features of its race-bred cars to the V8 line including a longitudinal mounted engine with dry sump lubrication. In fact the whole design of the chassis was a departure from the traditional construction used in the 328 and before. The result was a car that could lap Ferrari’s test track, Fiorano, some 7 seconds quicker than its immediate predecessor. This is by far the largest step forward in on-track performance of either the V8 or the V12 Ferrari model lines to date and, to give it perspective, is practically the same as the recorded time difference between a road going 355 F1 and a 458 Italia. Indeed even today in one of our own current race series - The Pirelli Ferrari Formula Classic - while the regulations have for some years stated that “Cars must be Ferrari production tipos built prior to 1990” which would include the 348 having been in production in 1989, they go on to exclude the 348 by adding “(ie before the tipo 348)” The regulations do however allow the 348’s sister car, the Mondial T to compete although it was built at the same time as the 348, has the same engine and in fact uses a more sophisticated suspension system. However, while the Mondial T is much closer to the other cars competing in terms of performance, the 348 is not, particularly when race prepared. I assume the exclusion is in order to ensure a more balanced field. Overall, the introduction of the 348 was clearly a big step up for a purely road going V8 and lead to the introduction of the 348 Challenge Series, allowing owners to experience this performance in a competitive environment. The motoring press initially sang the praises of Ferrari’s new ‘baby supercar’.
And then that all seemed to change. While many say that the change can be linked with the release of the Honda NSX, that is not strictly speaking true. The NSX was in fact released to the world first, in February of ’89 in Chicago while the 348 was not launched until September of that year, yet the change in the way the press at the time saw the 348 did not occur until slightly later. One of the factors in the way in which the model was seen can almost certainly be attributed to comments made by the incoming Ferrari Chairman – Luca di Montezemolo. Famously, in a meeting with his engineers in 1991, when he was setting out why things at Maranello had to change, one of his engineers held up the 348 as an example of why, the road car division at least, was in fact in good shape. Luca told the assembled staff how wrong they were by recounting a story of how he was embarrassed by a driver of a Golf GTI in an impromptu traffic light drag race, adding words roughly meaning “This, to me, is not a Ferrari!” We know about this story because Luca told it to the press on numerous occasions, often causing a certain amount of annoyance to current 348 owners. For me it causes more amusement than annoyance given that the fastest Golf GTI at the time had a 0-60 time some 3 seconds slower than a 348 and would cross the quarter mile mark at least 30 car lengths back in a fair fight. It would be akin to my 348 blowing away a 458 Italia in a drag race. Still, no matter how absurd the story may seem, the damage was done. The idea that your average hot hatch was just as fast as some chap’s Ferrari, and that even Ferrari themselves admitted this, was hugely popular with certain members of the public and the press lapped it up. The story has been repeated time and time again ever since.
Many members of the motoring press who were not fans of Ferrari in general now had a target, and even journalists who had previously sang the praises of the 348 started to find problems with the car. In the UK even our own Jeremy Clarkson, on first driving the 348 noted, “If the car had been good, or even very good, that would have been enough. The fact that it was a Ferrari would have swung the vote. But the car is, in fact, a sensation.” He also said that it made a laughing stock out of a Honda NSX, that he would prefer to own one to a Lamborghini Diablo and that comparing the 348 to a BMW 850i was “like watching one of those nature programmes when a whale eats a plankton.” Some years later he used the 348 as an example of the inadequacies of many Ferraris, recalling how he had thought the handling felt as if the tyres were made of wood. He was by no means alone in his marked change of opinion; selective amnesia throughout the popular motoring press seems to have been rife. Many orders were cancelled, including my car’s as it happens, and she sat in a showroom for months with no owner. Whether as a direct result of Luca’s comments or not, the reputation of the 348 was changed almost overnight. The 348 was seen by many as an inferior Ferrari, often without having ever driven an example. I believe this largely accounts for the formation of what is affectionately called ‘The 348 Brotherhood’. To be in ‘The Brotherhood’ you need to be the owner of, or have previously owned, a Ferrari 348. Members from the UK, the States, across Europe and the Far East are in touch through many of the Ferrari based forums. It is a fairly close knit group within the wider Ferrari owning family and I’m sure it is all the closer because of the ‘flak’ that has come the way of their pride and joys over the years.
And yet it does not seem like this is entirely the end of the story for the 348. It would appear that slowly the way in which this particular model is being viewed is changing and over the last year or so there have been several articles in the motoring press showing the 348 in a light that it hasn’t been seen in for some time. Classic Cars rounded off an article comparing the 348 to the much praised 355 by saying,
“But I bet you’d be enthralled by the distinctively analogue 348tb. It is more demanding with greater intensity. It also requires a longer and gentler learning curve, a defter touch and more patience. Arguably the beguiling 348 makes more sense as a classic perspective than a contemporary one. Be it an occasional treat or potent trackday tool, it is an antidote to disconnected modern motoring.
It won’t be to everyone’s taste, but for those who prefer something stronger than a mug of cocoa, it really does hit the spot.”
While Henry Catchpole of Evo Magazine, having openly admitted the 348 was the car he was least looking forward to driving in a comparison of the 308, 348, 355, 360, 430 and 458 simply writes,
“There are similarities and differences from first to last but each has its own distinct personality and you could find multiple perfectly rational and perfectly irrational reasons for being excited by any one of them. For example, my highlight was probably the 348’s steering, and that’s not something I’d expected at the beginning of the day.”
It is not only the British motoring press who seem to be changing their opinion of the 348. Across in the States it would seem that this change in the way in which the model is perceived is noticeable as well. A few months ago Exotic Car Resource (ECR) named their ‘Car of the Year’. Every year the staff at ECR decide the finalists from the best cars they have test driven over the year and the public then vote. The finalists were the Aston Martin Vantage, Lamborghini Aventador, Lamborghini Gallardo, Porsche 911, Mercedes SLS AMG, Hennessey Cadillac, Ferrari 458 – all the most recent variants of each....... and the eighth finalist was the Ferrari 348. At the end of the voting it was quite literally a landslide for the older Ferrari, gaining about 40% of the overall vote with its closest rival gaining less than half of that. The ECR test driver who drove the 348 actually tested it with the stated aim of ‘exposing’ how weak it was to the owner, a friend of his. By the end of the article he had had a slight change of heart and said how angry he was that he had believed what he had previously been told about the model. He described it as a “magnificent” car and said the steering feel was, “by far the best I have ever felt in any car I have ever driven.”
So it would definitely seem that, slowly, the perception of the 348 is changing. What was seen by many as shortcomings in the car such as the ‘iffy’ handling that I was warned about, is now being seen more as a race-bred, almost ‘live-wire’ personality that needs to be understood, respected and for those with a bit of skill, perhaps even tamed. Those who know the 348 best have long seen the car for what it truly is. In 1993 the Michelotto performance tuning house in Italy prepared several 348s for the Italian GT Championship where they quite literally blew the competition away, posting first in class in 8 out of 11 races and relegating the Porsches to a distant second. They repeated this success in 1994 by recording 9 firsts all of which prompted Michelotto to further develop several 348s, two of which were entered in Le Mans that year. Later, in 2000, in developing the Ferrari Enzo, it was three modified 348s, referred to as M1, M2 and M3, that were used by Ferrari as test ‘mules’ to help create what became one of the world’s greatest Supercars.
That the model is finally being seen in a different light by others is perhaps no real surprise, after all there is a very good reason that it also retains some of the soul of the earlier cars. As well as being the last new car commissioned by Enzo Ferrari (although he didn’t live to see its launch) it was also the last Ferrari to bear the name of Leonado Fioravanti as its designer. For those unfamiliar with this great man’s work he gave us the Daytona, Berlinetta Boxer, 246 Dino, 308 GTB, 288 GTO and F40. The last combination of Enzo’s vision of a sports car and Leonado’s designing prowess was the Ferrari 348 so perhaps the model’s raw, uncompromising feel when driven hard, together with its stunning looks, should come as no real surprise. Perhaps it’s just taken some longer than others to fully understand it.
I had a wry smile to myself when I saw an advert not so long ago from one of the Specialists who originally told me they avoided the 348 and implied I should do likewise. It merely said “Wanted - Ferrari 348, to replace one we’ve recently sold.” How times change.
P.D. No quiero ni mucho menos desviar el hilo de este tema...