Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Ghibli track day

I received an email from Jarle in Norway this weekend with some links to video footage shot of his Ghibli on the track.



This second clip shows his Ghibli behind a Ferrari 308 and an Alfa...



...but by the next lap, he'd overtaken them both and made quite some distance on them...



...and by this clip, he was starting to get pretty confident, with a power slide coming out of the chicane! He manages to hold onto it though.



Jarle seems to have been quite pleased with his Ghibli's performance on the track, indicating that it easily kept up with a Ferrari F355 Spider (being faster out of the corners and even on the straights). Jarle has a 2.8 liter Ghibli which has superior torque to my 2.0 liter engined model and he suggests that it's this torque out of the corners that the Ferrari struggled to keep up with. Looking at the stats, the Ferrari should be a quicker car, with more power and a better balanced chassis given that it's mid-engined... although the 2.8 liter Ghibli does indeed have considerably more torque. I suspect that Jarle was just a better driver than the Ferrari drivers though!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hey Jonny, Jarle here..

http://www.lotusespritworld.com/ERoadtests/PerformanceCar_Aug97.html

Look at this link. It is quite obvious that the Ghibli 2.8 has amazing ingear accelerations. It is superior in this test to Porsche 911, Honda NSX, Lotus Espirite turbo even though it is the slowest car 0-60. Only the TVR tuscan Race car has better ingear times, and that is only slightly.

I feel very confident indeed that if the 355 would have been in this test, it would have been beaten quite dramatically as well.

0-60 acc is not very interresting on a track at all, ingear acc is what counts then.

A 2.0 Ghibli also beat the crap out of a 321 HP M3 in a test I have...

Perhaps you should bring your car to Norway next year? Join me for a trackday?

Later!

Cheers, Jarle