Despite Ferrari has its problems in the past with bankruptcy, I'd feel more confident now with them than I would with Ford.
Do you follow F-1? I don't, but I know its huge. I have mentioned this numerous times in another thread.... but Formula-E... the electric F1 racing series (a completely different company/organization) is gaining steam but it is still in its infancy for the most part. Now, maybe I'm a bit naive, but from where I sit, a blind man can see this will be the future of F1 racing in a decade or so. Liberty Media somehow has something to do with the old-school Formula One. It was some kind of SPAC deal. FWONA and FWONK This: ___________________________ The Pinnacle of Motorsport The Formula One Group consists of our wholly-owned subsidiary Formula 1® and other minority investments, including our interest in Liberty Media Acquisition Corporation and an intergroup interest in the Braves Group. The Series A and Series C Liberty Formula One common stock trade on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the stock symbols FWONA and FWONK, respectively. The Series B Liberty Formula One common stock is quoted on the OTC Markets under the symbol FWONB. About Formula 1 Formula 1 holds exclusive commercial rights to the FIA Formula One World Championship, an annual, approximately nine-month-long, motor race-based competition in which teams compete for the Constructors’ Championship and drivers compete for the Drivers’ Championship. Formula 1 racing began in 1950 and is the world’s most prestigious motor racing competition, as well as the world’s most popular annual sporting series: The 2022 FIA Formula One World Championship™ runs from March to November and spans 23 races in 21 countries across five continents. https://www.libertymedia.com/tracking-stocks/formula-one-group __________________________________ I don't know how this type of stuff goes down, or what's all involved, but... IF I WERE THE CEO OF THE WALT DISNEY COMPANY (DIS).... I WOULD BUY FORMULA-E AND PUT IT UNDER THE ESPN/ABC-SPORTS UMBRELLA TOMORROW... WHILE IT'S STILL CHEAP. ~vz
I've been a huge F1 fan for some decades now, since I was a wee tot. We attended the Austin race the last few years and I religiously tape all the practice sessions, qualifying, races etc... What's always been interesting to me is that F1 is generally where all the technological advancements for road cars begin. Paddle shifting in sports cars (where the clutch pedal no longer exists) and a computer handles the shifts is a great example - and many other advancements over the years that we all enjoy today. I feel like the value of Formula E right now is about right. It's cheap because there is still significant risk. They will follow the path of the EV at large in my view. There are still huge drawbacks to the overall EV picture at this stage. There is significant fossil fuel expended to create/assemble/transport them; the required rare earth metals that are 85% controlled by China; fossil fuel is need for the electricity to charge them; time to charge and distance on a charge; disposal of the batteries - they cannot be disassembled or recycled; the fact that today the purchase of EVs is largely subsidized. There are positives as well, but the balance feels like there are still some issues to work out over the long haul. Standard F1 cars run turbo hybrids that get about 1,000 HP from a 1.6L engine. F1 has also developed additional parts called the MGU-K and MGU-H that add more HP and eliminate "turbo drag" while increasing overall power efficiency. I feel like if we took a snapshot today of the optimal configuration for road cars, it's more akin to the F1 setup than the Formula E configuration. Personally I feel like too many people are too anxious to put all the eggs in the EV basket before we get all the kinks worked out.
I agree. It's like: ready or not, here they come. They're going to ram them down our throats it would seem. Are you old enough to remember Malibu Grand Prix? They were cool-cool. We dropped $1000's on those tracks as kids trying to get the best time. It was bad ass. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malibu_Grand_Prix
At its peak in the 1980s, the Malibu Grand Prix empire encompassed close to 50 tiny racetracks across the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Hundreds of thousands of racers racked up millions of laps at a buck-or-so a pop as we chased after ever-better times posted on the electronic timers just beyond the finish line. Devotees with treasured Malibu Grand Prix licenses included not just dweebs and wankers—again, like me—but celebrities such as the teenage Leonardo DiCaprio, the adult Tupac Shakur, and the totally addicted Paul Newman. the Jack Long Collection When the first Malibu Grand Prix opened in the parking lot of Anaheim Stadium in southern California on a Friday morning in 1975, there was a line of customers waiting to get in. More than 15,000 people sampled the faux-Formula 1 cars during the first week. Almost every middle-age racer I know logged seat time at Malibu Grand Prix. Not just poseurs but even guys who grew up to be big-name pros. “When I was a kid, every time we drove past the Malibu Grand Prix on the 210 Freeway, I would go, ‘Oh my God!’ I couldn’t believe how cool it was,” says four-time Trans Am champion Tommy Kendall. “As soon as I turned 16 and got my driver’s license, I started spending every spare penny I had at Malibu Grand Prix. Later, when I was driving the Malibu Grand Prix car [a Mazda RX-7 in professional IMSA competition], I would get this stack of tickets sent to me in the mail, and I couldn’t believe I was getting free laps at my favorite place on earth.” Looking back, the Malibu Grand Prix impulse seems less like a dream than a delusion. Although the cars were billed as scaled-down F1 thoroughbreds, they were nothing more than clunky, oversized go-karts with fancy fiberglass bodywork. Notwithstanding the aspirational rear wings and slick tires, the short circuits and serpentine layouts capped top speeds at about 40 measly mph. Wheel-to-wheel competition was strictly prohibited, and drivers had to come to a complete stop—and hand over a pre-purchased ticket—before starting another lap. the Jack Long Collection Whenever I wax poetic about the glories of Malibu Grand Prix, young racers gaze at me with a wordless eye roll reserved for old fogeys on a pathetic nostalgia trip. You spent all that time and money on what? Of course, hindsight is 20/20, and every new generation loves to sneer at the foibles of the one that preceded it. Before dismissing Malibu Grand Prix as a pitiful form of boomer cosplay, however, consider the amateur road racing landscape circa 1975.
Malibu Grand Prix was the brainchild of Ron Cameron, who’d earned his first million in the stock market while he was still in college. Like a lot of rich young men, Cameron amassed a collection of high-performance toys—boats, bikes, and sundry off-road vehicles—that constantly needed attention, so he hired a moonlighting Pasadena firefighter, Jack Long, to maintain them. A Wall Street Journal article about Grand Prix of America encouraged Cameron to consider opening a track of his own, and he asked Long if he could build a viable car. “I can build anything,” Long said. “But what are you going to do about getting gas?” This was during the fuel crisis, when cars idled for hours at gas stations. But Cameron wasn’t worried. “Hell,” he said, “they’ll be having so much fun, they’ll bring their own gas!” Cameron put together a prospectus and had no trouble finding investors. “Ron had one of those dynamic personalities,” says David Bursteen, who joined the company a year after it opened and eventually rose to vice president of marketing. “He could get anybody excited about anything.” To seal the deal, Cameron arranged test drives along the circular driveway in front of his mansion in Malibu. Cameron raised $250,000 in seed money from local businessmen and leased space in the parking lot of Anaheim Stadium, home of the Los Angeles Angels baseball team. He then commissioned Long to design a car to be built in the nearby shop of Bill Stroppe, who ran Ford’s West Coast racing operation. After the initial production run of 24 cars, Long set up a dedicated Malibu Grand Prix operation in Anaheim and, later, a much larger one in Woodland Hills, where a crew of 20 cranked out hundreds of cars. the Jack Long Collection Over the next four decades, Malibu Grand Prix would be repeatedly resold, reshaped, and rebranded. Along the way, the company developed new cars and collected a ragtag menagerie of models from failed racetrack franchises. Cars were later modified as components broke, suppliers changed, and tastes shifted. Today, all of these mismatched cars are often grouped generically—and misleadingly—under the Malibu Grand Prix umbrella. The original Malibu Grand Prix car was dubbed the Virage—a sophisticated name (meaning “curve” in French) for a workmanlike but robust piece of shade-tree engineering. Although the general idea was to create a car that looked like a two-thirds-scale version of an F1 or Indy car, Long’s primary concern was making sure it could withstand what promised to be brutal wear and tear, so the Virage was based largely on proven technology and built like a tank. A conventional ladder-type frame fabricated out of round 4130 chromoly tubing served as a stout foundation. The front suspension was inspired by the twin I-beam layout found on Ford F-Series pickups, while the rear end featured a live axle located by trailing arms. Long went with discs brakes at the front and drums at the rear. Although the tractor-style worm-and-gear steering was vague, Goodyear slicks mounted on 10-inch wheels generated unexpectedly impressive cornering loads. The drivetrain was built around a single-rotor Fichtel & Sachs rotary engine that, like the drive belts, were often used in snowmobiles. (Later, it was superseded by slightly more powerful and much more reliable two-stroke and then four-stroke motors.) The Dana rear end incorporated a centrifugal clutch typically found in golf carts. With a hammerhead nose and a large, freestanding rear wing, the fiberglass bodywork resembled the Formula 1 March 751 car and A.J. Foyt Coyote Indy car of the day. The Virage weighed roughly 650 pounds and made 28 horsepower, which translated into a decent power-to-weight ratio. To minimize risk, Long limited speed in two ways—first, by creating serpentine circuits with no extended straightaways, and second, by designing the Ackerman steering geometry to promote understeer. Lot and lots of understeer. “Every car was different, but all of them pushed like pigs,” says my friend Tommy Browne, who used Malibu Grand Prix to transition from motocross to race cars. “So what you’d do was stick seat cushions behind you to push you forward in the cockpit and get more weight on the front wheels. That worked so well that I tried stuffing pillows on each side of my legs so I wasn’t flopping around the cockpit. When I got out of the car, my leg was numb—for two weeks! Turned out I’d pinched my sciatic nerve.” Thanks to its tight performance window, the Virage was surprisingly tricky to drive quickly. “You had to know how to pick the right car,” Kendall says. “Some of them had bad clutches. Some had better brakes. Because of the suspension travel and the open diff, you couldn’t pitch the car like a go-kart, and if you overdrove it like a race car driver, you’d be slow. It was tough for the open-wheel guys. I think my showroom stock experience really helped.” Setting a quick lap time required talent, technique, determination, and seat time. Lots and lots of seat time. For hard-core would-be racers with no other outlet, Malibu Grand Prix became an obsession. (Ask me how I know this.) There are plenty of stories of guys—and they were always guys—spending $1000 a month, looking for elusive tenths of seconds. <<<< VZ Barry Goldstein was a thirtysomething CPA when he got hooked. “I would leave work early—I was the boss, so that was easy—and I’d drive 30, 40, 50 laps before I went home to eat dinner,” he recalls. “There was a special car they’d pull out for me, and I had a custom fiberglass seat that they would fit in the cockpit. I probably did, on average, 300 laps a week.” Today, Goldstein tracks a Porsche Cayman with a built 3.8-liter 911 motor. But his claim to motorsports fame is that he used to hold the lap record at the Malibu Grand Prix in Northridge.
I was on the east coast then, which is probably for the best because I would have lived there and spent every dollar I ever had. That sounds awesome!!! especially in the 70's.