The week of the Pebble Beach Concours is a little crazy. Walking around downtown Monterey, you might see two street-parked 300 SLs. You might see a Rothmans liveried Porsche 911 rally car just tooling around. And you might have a guy hand you the keys to his vintage Ferrari and tell you to “drive it like it's yours” before adding, “don't hit anything.”
The guy with the keys is David Mohlman. He's made a business of buying and selling old cars like the 1966 275 GTS pictured above. He seems to be about as friendly as they come and he's more trusting with his cars than most.
One of his garages is tucked in an industrial park near Monterey's little airport. The park has a number of restoration shops, detailing shops and mechanics shops, most of which were teeming with expensive and or rare cars when we arrived there to meet him.
So, when we're given the keys after about 30 seconds of orientation -- “It's a little cold-blooded. Don't run up the tach until it's warm. If the fuel cuts out, flip this [fuel pump] switch.” After we forget to release the parking brake we finally get underway. We are not only hyper-aware of the fact that we're driving a tremendously valuable borrowed car, but that we're surrounded by tremendously valuable cars. The possibility of a multi-million dollar fender-bender is right there in our faces, with only our meager wits and 47-year-old brakes to prevent it. At least they're all discs.
Nerves or no, if someone hands you the keys to an Enzo-era Ferrari, you damn well better drive it. And so we did. For about 20 minutes, we bombed around the Monterey hillside extremely carefully.
David Mohlman You don't push the Ferrari V12 to its redline, but you nudge it a couple of times, once everything's warmed up -- you kind of have to.
Having driven a couple of modern Lamborghinis that morning (life is hard) the 275 GTS definitely didn't feel like it was attached to an aircraft catapult -- it felt so much better than that. Applying the throttle gets the three Webers breathing, and then there's that heart-wrenching V12 noise, and then there's extra-legal speed. Do you let it run all the way up to 7,000 rpm? No, you don't. But you nudge it a couple of times, once everything's warmed up -- you kind of have to.
Even if it isn't modern-car fast, it's got around 260 hp to motivate just under 2,500 lbs. It definitely isn't slow. The action of the gated, five-speed shifter is precise and smooth and so deeply emotionally satisfying that you'll curse the name of Adolphe Kégresse in your sleep for weeks. You'll do it in French so that the bastard understands. By the way, that shifter is connected to a rear-mounted transaxle.
When you read that a modern car's pedals are set up well for heel-toe downshifting you are reading lies. The 275 GTS has pedals that make a very good heel-toe easier than pulling a dainty paddle and about a thousand times less emasculating. Of course the trade-off there is that all three pedals are close enough to each other that they practically touch -- be careful with those brakes, buddy. The steering is fantastic by old car standards in that it causes the car to change direction in such a way that the driver can predict.
It would be a lie to say that we pushed the car hard enough to get good a feel for its fully independent suspension. It was compliant and the car never tried to kill us.
David Mohlman The 1966 Ferrari 275 GTS is so damned perfect that you immediately understand why a guy would shell out whatever is necessary to have one.
In short, the Ferrari 275 GTS is gorgeous in every respect. It's so damned perfect that you immediately understand why a guy would shell out whatever is necessary to have one. It's been nearly a month since we've seen it in person and we still remember the way it sounds and smells.
When the subject of extremely pricey old cars comes up, we usually relish conversations that go like this: “Oh, yeah (car) is pretty cool, but why spend (small fortune) on one when you can get 9/10ths the ownership experience with a (cool, cheap car) at (some far-smaller amount of money).” Then everyone looks around like, “we're so smart, we should be rich.”
The thing is, with the Enzo-era Ferraris, there really isn't anything that fits in those parentheses except for other, totally unattainable cars.
source: http://www.autoweek.com/article/20130906/CARREVIEWS/130909897
by Rory Carroll
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