Before you watch the following video, take a minute to ponder this: You are sitting behind the steering wheel of an exotic, brand new Italian supercar, getting ready to drag race a V10-powered Dodge Viper on the quarter mile strip in front of a crowd of 100, or perhaps even more people. But when the race begins you start rolling backwards� Oh yes, that�s right; the owner of the Ferrari 458 Italia that you�re about to see in the clip and who was pitted against a Dodge Viper at the ICAR motorsports complex situated just outside of Montreal in Canada, paddle shifted his car�s dual clutch auto transmission into reverse!
The bashed up 599 GTO we showed you yesterday wasn�t the only Ferrari to bite the dust at this past weekend's Trofeo Ferrari Club Italia event at the Vallelunga racetrack near Rome. The same fate awaited this red 458 Italia when its driver apparently lost control of the exotic supercar in a corner sending it straight onto the protective barriers. In a somewhat unfitting end for the Ferrari, a tractor had to be called in to carry away the car. Watch the incident unfold in the video after the jump.
While we are happy to see that at least some owners of the rare Ferrari 599 GTO (of which only 599 examples will be built) take their cars out to their natural habitat on the racetrack, it�s always a sad sight when one of those exotics ends up like this. The Youtube poster of the video says that the driver lost control of the car �at the end of the straight at 250km/h (155mph)�, but given the relatively modest damages to the 599 GTO, we reckon that he either had a lot of space in front of him or the crash occurred at much lower speeds, perhaps even both.
The 458 Italia, Ferrari's V8 supercar, is the default choice in its category. Sexy, with a fabulous design and the latest in automotive technology, it is a pure driver�s car to be enjoyed by anyone who can afford it. Yet McLaren plans to spoil Ferrari�s party claiming that its own brand-new supercar, the MP4-12C, can beat it. On paper, little separates them. But the question for car fanatics remains: which one is better? To find out, Channel 5's Fifth Gear presenters Tiff Needell and Jason Plato decided to pit the Ferrari against its new challenger from Britain.
A few days ago we reported on the seven finalists of Ferrari�s World Design Contest in which the best design schools from all over the globe submit their proposals, both in Autodesk 3D software and in actual 1:4 scale models. Their goal? To envision the Ferraris of the future or in the words of the Italian supercar company, �design a pure supercar with technology and materials from the latest generation, a car with an extreme architecture, while functional in every aspect�.
