The stars had clearly aligned when Ferrari introduced the prototype 365GT4 BB at the 1971 Turin Salon. There was already precedent for its decision to go mid-engined, with the 1967 Dino 206 (and later 246) so configured. And it would have been impossible for Ferrari to ignore that its four-year-old, front-engined 365GTB/4 Daytona had always been head-to-head with Lamborghini's mid-engined Miura, then the epitome of advanced automotive engineering.
It wasn't as if a Ferrari with a 12-cylinder motor mounted amidships was a new concept. The benefits in terms of sharper handling and superior aerodynamics of an engine located aft of the cockpit had been proved since 1964 in Maranello's 512 racer. It also pioneered a new engine design: Ferrari was the first car maker to employ a 'flat', or horizontally opposed, 12-cylinder unit, the packaging of which would have been impractical in a front-engined racer.
When the production-ready 365 Berlinetta Boxer arrived in 1973, this technology was fully embraced. In effect a wide-angled vee, with 180° separating each bank of cylinders, its all-new 4.4-litre flat-12 produced a solid 380bhp at 7200rpm and 301lb-ft of torque at 3900rpm. It was a wide unit, but the configuration kept mass lower down in the chassis, although with its transaxle mounted below, beside the wet-sump (a dry sump didn't appear until the later 512BB), that advantage was never fully exploited.
この記事は Classic & Sports Car の April 2022 版に掲載されています。
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この記事は Classic & Sports Car の April 2022 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
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A Breath of Fresh Air- Alfa Romeo's exotic, V8-powered Montreal was like nothing the marque had made before, but can it compare with a Porsche masterpiece, the 911S 2.4?
The stereotype of the ItaloGermanic automotive rivalry is that the Latin car will be brilliant to drive, but poorly built and ergonomically flawed, while the Teutonic will be the opposite. Yet these 2+2 sports coupés both ran against orthodoxy. In the Montreal, Alfa Romeo created an outlandish-looking two-door more comfortable, more powerful and more refined than anything it had produced for decades. Meanwhile, Porsche continued to refine its back-to-front, austere and increasingly aged 911. Neither took a traditional development path, but both created thrilling and individual cars that have echoed through the decades.
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ICON.
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