Ferrari F70 ~ Enzo Replacement A Twin-Turbo V8

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If you haven’t yet received a card from Maranello inviting you to cough up a million more or less for the new Enzo replacement you’re out of luck. Only 399 cards were printed and you are obviously not on the ‘A’ list.

Some details have emerged about Ferrari’s long-awaited Enzo replacement, the F70. Smaller, lighter, and faster than the Enzo, the F70 will have a target weight of just 1,000kg (2,204 lbs) as previewed by the ‘Millechilli’ (Italian for one thousand kilos) concept in 2007. This is 807 lbs less than the original Enzo, a phenomenal bonus for performance and handling. To achieve this lighter weight, Ferrari will equip the F70 with carbon fiber body panels, carbon-ceramic brakes, and a spartan race-oriented interior. Think F40.

The F70 is expected to use a twin-turbo V8 (again like the F40). The V8 will produce about 660 bhp (485 kW), approximating the output of the Enzo’s 6.0-liter V12. With a lighter chassis, the F70 should accelerate from 0-60 mph in 3.0 seconds and hit a top speed in excess of 230 mph. Even so, the engine will be relatively fuel-efficient and reduce CO2 emissions.

At a price around £600,000 ($991,800 USD / €657,750), production will likely be limited to 399 units when it goes on “sale” (as usual, Ferrari will select who can buy the car) in 2012. Illustrations are speculative and based in part on the 2007 show car.

Auto Express reports: “a twin-turbo V8 will provide the power. It will be the first use of turbos in a production Ferrari since the 1987 F40, making this the spiritual successor to that definitive hypercar.

Internally codenamed the F70, the newcomer will use knowledge gathered from the FXX scheme. This invited customers to buy a pumped-up and stripped-out version of the Enzo for £1.5million, but allowed them to drive their purchases only on approved track days. Afterwards, they briefed Ferrari on possible improvements.

The philosophy behind this new downsized and lightweight hypercar is derived from 2007’s Millechilli concept. Although little more than a fibreglass model, it demonstrated Ferrari’s aim to increase the performance of future models by shedding weight, not by hiking power. Millechilli means 1,000kg in Italian. It’s an ambitious target for the F70’s kerbweight – a full 365kg less than the Enzo – but Ferrari is ready to apply every weight-saving measure possible.

Rival McLaren is leading the way in lightweight construction, with an F1-style carbon fibre tub forming the basis of its MP4-12C supercar, so Ferrari wants to regain the initiative in this area. An overhauled and shrunken tub, carbon fibre body panels – plus carbon-ceramic brakes and a no-frills cabin – should keep weight to a minimum. Ferrari already heads efforts to reduce CO2, having slashed output by 10 per cent in 2009. It promises further cuts from its current 387g/km average by 2012.

But reducing body mass alone won’t be enough to achieve this. To slash CO2 significantly, the engine also needs an advanced design. The Enzo’s V12 will make way for a new direct-injection twin-turbo V8 – the same layout as in the legendary F40. Output is likely to be on a par with the Enzo’s 660bhp, but that lower weight should put performance on another level. Expect a three-second 0-60mph time and top speed in excess of 230mph.

A twin-turbo V6 is also under consideration, to replace the 458 Italia and California’s V8s. Yet before either unit is signed off, engineers are keen to eliminate turbo lag. The F40 was famous for the delay between throttle inputs and the arrival of a savage wave of torque. But Ferrari claims it won’t resort to turbos again until it’s perfected the technology to give the instant response for which its naturally aspirated cars are renowned.

One option is electric or hybrid chargers. These use a small electric motor to spool the turbos up to operating speeds much faster than in a normal set-up, where exhaust gas has to be recirculated. The result is a virtual elimination of turbo lag and a linear power delivery that will be familiar to owners of current Ferraris.

Just like the Enzo, the F70 will be strictly limited to a production run of 399 examples, adhering to Ferrari’s philosophy of always building one less car than you think you can sell. But not just anyone will be able to put their name on the waiting list. Buyers will need to be personally invited by Ferrari to stump up the expected million (£600,000) asking price when the car goes on sale in 2012.

Read more here:

How To Read Bar Codes: stuff they don’t tell you….

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and why the hell not?

Thanx to Fred for this one.

The Continuum

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ObamaCare – the End of America

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Mark Steyn nails it…

“Once the state swells to a certain size, the people available to fill the ever-expanding number of government jobs will be statists – sometimes hard-core Marxist statists, sometimes social-engineering multiculti statists, sometimes fluffily “compassionate” statists, but always statists. The short history of the post-war welfare state is that you don’t need a president-for-life if you’ve got a bureaucracy-for-life: The people can elect “conservatives,” as the Germans have done and the British are about to do, and the Left is mostly relaxed about it because, in all but exceptional cases (Thatcher), they fulfill the same function in the system as the first-year boys at wintry English boarding schools who, for tuppence-ha’penny or some such, would agree to go and warm the seat in the unheated lavatories until the prefects strolled in and took their rightful place.

Republicans are good at keeping the seat warm. A bigtime GOP consultant was on TV, crowing that Republicans wanted the Dems to pass Obamacare because it’s so unpopular it will guarantee a GOP sweep in November.

“I’ve been bandying comparisons with Britain and France, but that hardly begins to convey the scale of it. Obamacare represents the government annexation of “one-sixth of the U.S. economy” – i.e., the equivalent of the entire British or French economy, or the entire Indian economy twice over. Nobody has ever attempted this level of centralized planning for an advanced society of 300 million people. Even the control-freaks of the European Union have never tried to impose a unitary “comprehensive” health care system from Galway to Greece. The Soviet Union did, of course, and we know how that worked out.

“…government health care is not about health care, it’s about government. Once you look at it that way, what the Dems are doing makes perfect sense. For them.

Panel taken from the comic strip “Secret Origin of the Baracker” here…

Alice In Healthcare Land

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Thomas Sowell has a superb series on why Obamacare is a really, really bad idea….

Alice in Health Care
Thomas Sowell

Tuesday, March 02, 2010

Most discussions of health care are like something out of Alice in Wonderland.

What is the biggest complaint about the current medical care situation? “It costs too much.” Yet one looks in vain for anything in the pending legislation that will lower those costs.

One of the biggest reasons for higher medical costs is that somebody else is paying those costs, whether an insurance company or the government. What is the politicians’ answer? To have more costs paid by insurance companies and the government.

Back when the “single payer” was the patient, people were more selective in what they spent their own money on. You went to a doctor when you had a broken leg but not necessarily every time you had the sniffles or a skin rash. But, when someone else is paying, that is when medical care gets over-used — and bureaucratic rationing is then imposed, to replace self-rationing.

Money is just one of the costs of people seeking more medical care than they would if they were paying for it with their own money. Both waiting lines and waiting lists grow longer when people with sniffles and minor skin rashes take up the time of doctors, while people with cancer are waiting.

In country after country, the original estimates of government medical care costs almost always turn out to be gross under-estimates of what it ultimately turns out to cost.

Even when the estimates are done honestly, they are based on how much medical care people use when they are paying for it themselves. But having someone else pay for medical care virtually guarantees that a lot more of it will be used.

Nothing would lower costs more than having each patient pay those costs. And nothing is less likely to happen.

One of the big costs that have actually forced some hospitals to close is the federal mandate that hospitals treat everyone who comes to an emergency room, whether they pay or not. But those who talk about “bringing down the cost of medical care” are not about to repeal that mandate. Often they want to add more mandates.

The most fundamental issue is not whether treating everyone who comes to an emergency room is a good policy or a bad policy in itself. If it is a good policy, then the federal government should pay for what it wants done, not force other institutions to pay for it. Then let the voters decide at the next election whether that is what they want their tax money spent for.

Confusion between costs and prices add to the Alice in Wonderland sense of unreality.

What is called lowering the costs is simply refusing to pay all the costs, by having the government set lower prices, whether for doctors’ fees, hospital reimbursements or other charges. Surely no one believes that there will be no repercussions from refusing to pay for what we want. Some doctors are already refusing to accept Medicare or Medicaid patients because the government’s reimbursement levels are so low.

Similarly, if it costs a billion dollars to create one new pharmaceutical drug, then either we are going to pay the billion dollars or we are not going to keep on getting new pharmaceutical drugs produced. There is no free lunch.

Virtually everything that is proposed by those who are talking about bringing down the costs of medical care will in fact raise those costs. Mandates on insurance companies? Why are insurance companies not already doing those things that new mandates would require? Because those things raise costs by an amount that people are unwilling to pay to get those benefits.

If not, it would be a slam dunk for the insurance companies to add those benefits to the policies and raise the premiums to cover them. What politicians want to do is look good by imposing mandates, and then let the insurance companies look bad by raising the premiums to cover the additional costs.

It is a great political game, but it does nothing to lower medical costs.

Politicians who want a government monopoly on health insurance can easily get it, just by making it impossible for private insurance companies to charge enough to cover the costs mandated by politicians. The “public option” will then be the only option — which is to say, we will no longer have any real option.

Read all four parts of Spwell’s series on Health Care here…

Hitler’s Summer ~ An Album from Germany

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“OK – this guy walks into a bar and..”

“I’ll see your bet and raise you ten”

“God! I love your outfit!”

“I’m sorry, sir. No one can be seated without black tie.”

Iowahawk’s Master Plan of Doom

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Apparently Iowahawk has escaped again. They should never have moved him from Guantanamo to Chicago! Excerpts from his latest deranged rambling Your Money Or Your Government: Operation Unstimulus follow below…

Your Money or Your Government

Iowahawk Guest Commentary
by Professor Egon Klaus Nefarius
Chairman, Diabolic Racketeering and Crime Organization (D.R.A.C.O.)
.

“No, the Pulsar Doom-Ray will not kill you — immediately. Ah, if only you were that fortunate! Instead, my ingenious device will instantaneously fuse shut the doors of your precious Congress and regulatory agencies. One touch of this button, and I shall bring your entire federal apparatus to a grinding halt — leaving you to suffer week upon week of Washingtonless agony!

Imagine now, if you dare, the fate that I may choose for you: first your vaunted health care bill will die, unreconciled, leaving you with a primitive 2009-level medical system. Trillions of dollars of your life-giving fiscal stimulus will go unspent, throwing tens of your countrymen out of work. Your ‘Smart Diplomacy’ peace partnership initiatives will go uncommunicated, resulting in discomfort and ill ease among the international community!

And this is just the beginning. The aftershocks will be no less painful, as the soothing transmissions of your public radio will fall silent. Diversity goals will remain unmeasured. Warning labels unmandated. Entire crops and cutting-edge artist communities will go unsubsidized. Cut off from your precious heroic public servants, you will be forced to helplessly fend for yourselves in the utter chaos of a dystopian unregulated hellscape where the living will envy the dead!

Continue reading here…

Here’s The Problem…

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Economic analysis indicates we have an enormous debt burden hanging over us and we are not producing very much shit.

Al Gore Exposed: How Climate Change Rings the Cash Register

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By THE WASHINGTON TIMES

The greatest scandal connected to global warming is not exaggeration, fraud or destruction of data to conceal the weakness of the argument. It is those who are personally profiting from promoting this fantasy at the expense of the rest of us.

Al Gore is the most visible beneficiary. The world’s greatest climate-change fear-monger has amassed millions in book sales and speaking fees. His science-fiction movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” won an Academy Award for best documentary and 21 other film awards. He was co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his “efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Gore was laying his own foundations. As he was whipping up hysteria over climate change, he cannily invested in “green” firms that stood to profit in the hundreds of millions of dollars (if not more) from increased government regulations and sweetheart deals from connected politicians and bureaucrats. The multimillionaire climate dilettante was given a free pass by reporters, who refused to ask him hard questions about the degree to which he was profiting from the panic he was causing.

With the global-warming story line unraveling, the New York Times allowed Mr. Gore to run what amounted to an unpaid advertisement for his brand of climate-change hysteria. This screed, published Saturday, reiterated his claim that the world faces an “unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.” That’s pretty good rhetoric for the person with the largest carbon footprint in the world.

Read the rest here…

MIcrosoft Windows & Why You Get VIruses

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Karl Denninger explains all…

Today most hacked PCs run Microsoft’s Windows operating system, and the company has invested millions in trying to fight the problem.

That’s because the operating system was designed for backward compatibility with Windows 95 and 98 first (and 3.1 before it) which had no concept of permissions or privileges. It was (until Windows 7) thus inherently insecure and even Vista (and Win7) can be told to be insecure to deal with all those “legacy issues.”

In short, these machines are infested (not infected, infested) because their operating system has historically been full of security holes (this has improved, especially in Windows 7, to be fair.)

So what does Microsoft propose?

So who would foot the bill? “Maybe markets will make it work,” Charney said. But an Internet usage tax might be the way to go. “You could say it’s a public safety issue and do it with general taxation,” he said.

That’s nice.

Sell an insecure operating system and then get someone else to pay a tax because they bought an arguably-defective product you sold?

How about this instead Microsoft?

For each computer infested, the publisher of the operating system sold to that user is assessed a fine of US $100,000 by the Department of Justice.

I bet that would get you to improve security quite a bit – or bankrupt your ass.

Continue reading here…