Ferrari 849 Testarossa: Everthing's united

Hôtel de Paris, Monaco, 1971 A suite. Tanned and wearing only pants, he sits there. His trousers are almost up to his knees. As tenderly as if he were sliding an ice cube over the naked body of a beautiful woman, he pushes a piece of butter wrapped in golden-blue paper over a white tablecloth with just his fingertips. He has drawn the Monaco Grand Prix course on the tablecloth, the breakfast crockery, half grapefruits and coffee pots have been pushed to one side. Sir Jackie Stewart, not yet a British medallist at the time, but already a two-time Formula 1 world champion, a simple chap, a trained mechanic, who has difficulty reading and writing due to his dyslexia, talks about racing.

"Coming in here and getting the power on here. You get the power on here. You start to take the load off the car instead of braking harshly here, you break a little, quietly, nice and gentle. Just touch them, you know, make them feel..."

It's a monologue that Stewart delivers. Opposite him, but out of sight, sits Roman Polanski, silent most of the time. He is directing the documentary about Formula 1, which will be released in cinemas a year later under the title "Weekend of a Champion" .

It is poetry. No intellectual, no musician will ever find more beautiful words for the handling of a crude and quite deadly machine. Because these were the Formula 1 racing cars of the 1970s. Time and again in "Weekend Of A Champion", people run through the picture who were not to survive Formula 1: Ronnie Peterson, François Cevert, Jochen Rindt or Graham Hill, although the latter admittedly died in a plane crash.

What does all this have to do with the new Ferrari 849 Testarossa? Well, quite simply. The Ferrari 849 Testarossa has something that they should have called the "Sir Jackie Stewart" system consistently. Ferrari calls it the Ferrari Integrated Vehicle Estimator, or FIVE for short. Missed opportunity. But hey, we're in Seville. The sun is shining. And a sun-brimmed Italian called Francesco is explaining the system. He is a test driver at Ferrari: "FIVE is a calculation system: it creates a digital twin that replicates the behaviour of the vehicle in real time." Digital twin? Well, Jackie Stewart explains it like this: "You're being kind to your motor car. It's been kind to you, your great friends, you're married, you're having a fantastic affair. You know, everything's united."

The relationship tips from Ferrari are a little more technological and rather sober: "The basis for this is a simplified mathematical model based on real measurements, such as acceleration and 6D sensor. FIVE calculates precise performance characteristics, such as speed, with an error tolerance of less than one km/h, and yaw angles with a tolerance of less than one degree. This improves traction control and differential control as well as the performance of the e4WD system. These calculations are incorporated into the driving dynamics controls and make the model's response more precise and repeatable." In other words, when the driver "jabs" the brakes today, the ABS Evo calculates the vertical load transfer within microseconds. Thanks to the 6D sensor technology, the system knows exactly how much the car is dipping at the front and distributes the braking pressure to the four wheels in such a way that the platform remains stable. The car virtually decides for the driver to be friendly to him, even if the driver is a rough driver. The Ferrari 849 Testarossa is "gentle" to itself.

Jackie: "And when you take your foot off the brake, don't do that. Feed the brakes out. Because that way the car comes up gently to its proper ride height, you know, to, to where it is best suited for its road holding. And when that happens, then you allow them to go into the corner with a power on way back here. And again, the power doesn't go on like that..." Stewart makes a brusque folding motion with his hand, which is intended to show that the foot must not clumsily go fully onto the accelerator pedal, but... "...smoothly". Otherwise, what Stewart had observed with many people would happen: "...this is where you see the guys going round with opposite lock on, with the wheels spinning and the whole scene looking like that, a disaster in the making. You know, every corner is an adventure."

Jackie Stewart felt the car come out of its springs. Today, Ferrari calls this the restoration of the aerodynamic curve. In the 849 Testarossa, the FIVE system ensures that the ride height does not simply spring back when the brakes are released. The active dampers react to the 6D data of the vertical acceleration to keep the car exactly in the window in which the underbody diffuser generates maximum suction. What Stewart describes as "gentleness" in the Ferrari is a damping matrix that makes body roll mathematically impossible.

Stewart knew all this. And that's why he was his own FIVE: "I'm sure if you spoke to Fangio, he would tell you that the smoothest and the quietest way, the slowest way around Monte Carlo is the fastest."