Welcome to this episode of Assess and Caress on Jay Leno's Garage. The two cars we're featuring today are from the Audrain Automotive Museum in Newport, Rhode Island. One of the great museums — every three months the exhibits change. A lot of museums you go to, you go to them 10 years later and the same car's in the same spot. No, it's very fluid. It's a kinetic museum. It's a lot of fun. And these cars got here via Reliable Transportation. They drive them across the country and then they go back the same week and they don't get damaged, they don't get scratched. You know, they're enclosed trailers. So if you've got a car you want to transport, give them a call. I think you might like it. What are we doing here, Donald?
Well, Jay, today's theme is two-seat motoring, high and low.
Now, obviously, the high and low is obvious. And the cars are a 1981 Chevrolet Corvette and a 1997 Ferrari 355 F1 Berlinetta.
Well, like he says, with Donald, the high is obvious and the low as well. Okay, well, which one do you want to start with? Let's start with the Ferrari.
Okay, let me get on the other side here.
This is one of my favorite periods of Ferrari design. Pininfarina did a beautiful job. This car has much of the feeling of sort of the classic what you think of as a Ferrari, the 308 GTB, and it's also got a bit of that Ferrari Dino look. It's very clean, very elemental, aerodynamic, sexy, especially in black. It's absolutely amazing.
Well, it's interesting, and this is probably a very controversial thing to say, but there's another influence here that seems obvious to me. That's the Honda NSX. This looks like the Honda NSX. The Honda NSX, I think, was the car that made Ferrari re-evaluate everything, because they were selling cars and, yeah, well, I get to change the oil, but it wasn't customer-centric. They were selling cars and you bought it because it was Ferrari. When the NSX came out, here was a car — it was powerful, but it was not literally maintenance-free, but built to such a high quality, and it was a sports car. And I think Ferrari looked at that and evaluated, we got to get our game together here because, you know, competition is getting better and better all around the world. And I think it really made them change the game. Don't you see a little Honda NSX in this?
I do, but I think the influence is a little backwards. The Honda NSX was designed to look like an Italian sports car.
Well, yeah. Yeah, but it's very evident that — well, first of all, obviously everybody knows Honda did a brilliant job with the NSX.
And I think what the NSX really brought to the table was the fact that, you know, much like the Toyota 2000 GT, right?
It looked like a European car, but it was very much a Japanese car. And Honda did the same thing with the NSX because they made a car which instantly, to the entire world, said this is a sports car. This is a serious sports car. It looks like those Italian sports cars, but they brought a level of practicality to it and user-friendliness and reliability.
Exactly. The thing about this particular car, this year and this model, the 355, it's got a really wonderful engine. 375 horsepower, five valves per cylinder V8, and makes a wonderful sound, and it's a great performer. But what makes this very special is the fact that this is not a 355, which is the six-speed manual car,
Which is still a manual, by the way, but this is the first time that a paddle shift had ever been put into a passenger car for the road.
Oh, okay. And Ferrari was actually the first manufacturer to use paddle shifting in Formula 1.
Right. In 1989, the Ferrari 640, driven by Nigel Mansell and Gerhard Berger, launched this transmission, which was absolutely revolutionary. Electro-hydraulic actuation of the clutch. It was immediately successful and immediately problematic.
And how was it sales-wise? If this was a manual shift car, I assume the price would be substantially higher than whatever we come up with now. Wouldn't you agree, or no?
I will agree, and we'll get to that when we get to the valuation part of it. Immediately, the first race that Mansell ran it in, he won,
And he thought this is absolutely sliced bread, it's the best thing ever. And then he and Gerhard Berger proceeded to not finish the next five races because of reliability issues.
Every time the car finished, it was on the podium. So they knew that the technology worked, they had to perfect it. And which is one of the reasons why it took almost a decade for it to get from the racetrack to the road. Immediately, these cars were very sought after when they were new because of that Formula 1 connection. And this is the period when Michael Schumacher had just joined Ferrari. So Ferrari was beginning their ascendance. And so it was really very much a great marketing ploy and also an engineering ploy to actually put this kind of technology in a road car.
And this is a great handling car. I drove one of these on a track and I was hanging the tail out and sliding around. Boy, it was a lot of fun. I mean, that's now you're in a Ferrari. I mean, that's what made you feel like you're really in a Ferrari. Just the handling was unbelievable. But the thing about a manual gear — I mean, an automatic gearbox like this is, you know, the next gen is going to be improved and the one after that will be better than that. So in hindsight, when you go back to this, you go, 'Oh, it's the first-gen F1, so it's not going to be as crisp, as sharp as, you know, a manual is as fast as you can shift it.'
Exactly. And that's one of the things that they studied. This gearbox — and they're going to get the number wrong — changes gears in something like 0.2 seconds. Could a race car driver change a manual gearbox with a gate that quickly? Probably.
But the average driver was absolutely not going to be able to do it.
And so you asked the question, I didn't dodge the question about the sales. Most of the cars sold in 1997 were actually gated cars.
A number of the cars that were delivered as F1 cars have now, in the time in between, been converted to gated shift cars.
Right. Right. That in itself is a story, because in the long term, thinking about what makes a collector car desirable in terms of its place in history and what it meant to the manufacturer, ultimately those cars which started life as F1s and converted to gated floor shifts, I think in 20 years will not be as desired as this car which maintains the original gearbox.
Because not many of them were left, you know. It's like buying — all of a sudden now I have the Bentley four-door sedan, the 8-liter. They used to chop those up to make race cars out of them. Mine's one of the only ones left, and now it's crazy money because it's the only one left, you know.
But you buy a Ferrari for a lot of reasons. Hopefully driving it is the main one. And the gated shifter is part of the Ferrari experience, especially in the '90s, because you're coming from the '60s and all that. And just looking at the gated shift and the way it slams, there's nothing like it.
No, there's nothing like it. And it's really quite amazing. Quite amazing. But let's take a look at an alternative for a two-seater black sports car.
Slightly earlier, but very, very, very interesting indeed.
The Corvette C3, I think, is also an incredibly beautiful car. You know, it's got the whole Mako Shark in full effect.
That's so funny. That's the exact opposite of me. I thought it was okay. I like the C2 better.
I mean, it seems so unfair to put this Corvette against this Ferrari, because there's so much better Corvettes than the '81.
190 horsepower from a big V8 engine. That doesn't seem like a lot. Suspension, just body panel, just the rattle, you know, the way it's put together, fiberglass was still creaky. I mean, I would put the modern Corvette, the C8, against any car in the world now, regardless of price. You know, you couldn't do that back in this day. You bought this because it was less expensive. It's still fun, but in an American way. You know, the modern C8 is fun in a world way, in an international way, because we Americans like big things, do a burnout and all that kind of stuff, you know.
You have to admit, however, that the engineers who were working on Corvette, who were always sort of — I won't say apart as special, but special within General Motors — realized what the challenges were that they had to face with emissions and the safety regulations. So when they came up with this car, they did whatever they could to save weight because they knew they didn't have a lot of power, right? So they did things like this car has a fiberglass rear leaf spring, right? They used aluminum for the exhaust headers. They used magnesium for the valve covers. Anything they could do to save weight.
It's interesting you say that, because in this era of GM, when you had the marketing guys running everything, they were doing everything they could do to save money. So let's not use the high point. Let's not use — well, carbon fiber didn't exist — but let's not use the best lightweight. Let's use whatever we can get. You know, it's a bit like when the C2, when you look at the hood, it looks like there are slats in the hood. And the idea was the air would come through that and keep the car in the ground. But GM said, 'Oh, it costs too much to cut. Just paint them on.'
Yeah. I, you know, that was something you'd never see with Ferrari back in the day.
Now it's a totally different world. Now, like all the American car companies, GM is totally — everybody's an engineer, and that's really what makes it exciting.
Exactly. When the companies are run by engineers, it makes such a difference in the product. But you know, I think that we have to have sort of a moment of silence for the Corvette engineers, because they were really fighting to save their...
I'm not putting that down. I'm just saying when corporate tells you no, you can only spend this much. All right, where do we cut corners? You know, like when the C8 came out originally, I thought, 'All right, it's going to be more than the C7. It'll probably have a cast iron bell housing, you know, all that kind of thing.' And no, no, there's so much magnesium, aluminum, carbon fiber, as much as any exotic from Europe, and I just find it wonderfully satisfying and amazing.
Yeah. It's a terrific car. And something else that you mentioned about the Ferrari versus the NSX, I think has to be said about Corvettes. I mean, the Corvette people who are watching this already know this, and you know this as a Corvette owner, is that these are cars which are driven. Corvette owners drive across the country in their cars. They drive to meets. They drive on vacation. They're always cars that were meant to be driven. And you know how important that is to me. You know, I have my cross-the-country test of a car: do I want to spend more than 20 minutes in it?
And every Corvette I've ever driven has always been a car that you could spend a few hours in without a problem. Well, that's the credit, because when you pick up the Road & Track and Car and Driver shootout five times, and Corvettes show up and they usually win, because a lot of exotics don't want to take part in that arena for obvious reasons, you know. So that's why I always give those guys a little bit more credit, because they're here to play and everybody else is here to kind of show status or whatever it might be, you know. And although obviously a superior car, it's just a matter of how much superior versus price, you know.
And that's the other point of this segment, is to say what can you get out of a car in terms of the driving experience for the price you pay, right? And these are two, in my mind, very viable alternatives, very different cars that deliver different experiences, but the aim is the same: to have fun on the road in a practical way, right?
I mean, the difference is you need a water pump for this, you're getting a second mortgage. This, you walk into any auto parts store, small block Chevy water pump, here you go, here you go, boom, that's $79. Okay. I mean, you know, that's the difference. It's like I say, it's an American car. You fix it with a hammer. You know, it's pretty simple. You know, that's what's so much fun about these. You can do all the work yourself. You can do all of that, which does not have the complexity of what you need to work on this.
Although, again, thinking about how times have changed, this is a Ferrari. This is a period of Ferrari that I know people who work on their own 355s and 360s because they're not yet so out there.
Well, actually more 348s, 355s, not 360s.
Yes. Certainly today, there are no DIY cars anywhere, right?
And these are still, though, cars that you could do some basic maintenance on if you had to.
You're absolutely right. Major systems — and we'll talk about the one major system that is the biggest challenge in the Ferrari in a moment — are very expensive. So you have to keep that in mind in terms of actual driving and using the car. Let's have a chat about the values and how they might have changed in five years.
