SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2017 GQ.COM.AU 145CARS
Know Mount
Panorama
Mount Panorama has been a loud and
colourful part of Australia’s sporting
tapestry for decades, with its first
staging in 1963.
But the track’s first event was the
Australian Grand Prix, in the far braver
days of 1938. Modern F1 cars would never
be allowed to race around such a steep
and technically unsafe track, with its
6.2km length surrounded by trees, walls
and, infamously, had the odd adventurous
kangaroo cross it.
Perhaps the most insane people ever
to ride their luck on its steep slopes
(there’s a 174m vertical rise from the Pit
Straight to Brock’s Skyline at the top)
were the motorcycle racers who
competed here in the Australian
Motorcycle Grand Prix which then just
became known as the Easter races, before
some unfortunate rioting and mindless
violence shut the whole thing down.
While it has proved a theatre of dreams
for many larger-than-life characters over
the years, from Dick Johnson to Jim
Richards, the undisputed King of the
Mountain was Peter Brock.
Brocky, or Peter Perfect as the fans
called him, won the Great Race an
incredible nine times. In his day, he was
unbeatable around The Mountain, and
in 1979 his winning margin was an almost
unfeasible six laps.
In the same year, Bathurst also changed
the way everyone in the world watches
motorsport. It was the place where
Channel 7 unveiled the world’s first in-car
cameras, RaceCam, putting viewers in
the driver’s seat in a feat of technological
brilliance we now all take for granted.Supercars were already fairly
alarming machines before the
488 arrived, but it has taken
outrageous performance
to its limits.
The F1-trained engineers
at Ferrari have somehow
extracted 492kW and 760Nm
from a V8 engine of just 3.9
litres, which is like training
a four-year-old to hit as hard
as Mike Tyson.
The not inconsequentially
beautiful looking 488 can
explode from zero to 100km/h
in three seconds flat, but it’s
the zero to 200 time of 8.3
seconds that reallyrearranges time and space,
and makes it borderline unsafe
to drive on public roads.
Fortunately, a host of clever
electronic gizmos keep the
rubber planted to the road and
driving it is actually almost
easy, as long as you haven’t
blacked out from the g-forces
it creates around corners.
Predictably, it’s not cheap,
at a starting price of
$469,888. Throw in a few
necessary options, like
$21,739 paint and $10,500
wheels, and the car we drove
quickly hit a grand total of
$625,278. Whoa. ferarri.comTHE FERRARI 488 GTB
The Mountain is different, which we quickly
discover after breasting the huge hump on
Mountain Straight at 230km/h – at which point
all the air in my body was also trying to hide in
my shoes – and jag into a sharp, uphill canyon.
It’s here that the very hard and hurty-looking
walls close in on you for the first time and you have
to drive straight at them, then wrench the wheel
to the left, aiming for an apex you can’t see, but
must be there because you’ve seen it on television.
This is what the term ‘blind corner’ means, and
it’s not fun. Imagine doing a trust exercise in which
you have to run flat out at a wall, and you’ve been
promised that someone will pull it out of the way
just before you make contact. It’s a bit like that,
except that what stands to be damaged if things
go wrong is not just your body, but a hugely
expensive Ferrari that doesn’t belong to you.
The whole top half of Mount Panorama is
a soaring, shit-scary test of what a car can do, and
how far the human within is willing to push it.
To get the high-speed approach into Sulman Park
just right, V8 supercar drivers try to kiss the wall
with their door handles on corner entry – I’ve stood
at that bend and watched them shear off wing
mirrors. It looks terrifying enough from the hill,
but it’s a lot worse from the driver’s seat.
On the plus side, the walls do magnify the
outrageous bellowing caterwaul of the Ferrari’s
twin-turbocharged V8 engine, right behind your
ears. And when you do get a corner right, finding
that invisible apex and slamming the throttle
towards the next one, the thrill is overwhelming, as
fear allows you to whoop loudly for a brief second.
The rush down the mountain, through the
vertiginous switchbacks of The Esses to Forrest’s
Elbow (named after some poor motorcyclist who
fell off there years ago, and left his elbow behind,
in pieces) is hard on your brakes, and your heart,
but from there you are into the legendary Conrod
Straight, and your shot at 300.
Sadly, what doesn’t come across on TV is just how
steeply said straight rises in the middle, meaning
your car gets light at around 270km/h, causing your
right foot to panic and stab the brake pedal.
You’re out of the walls now, thankfully, and the
last couple of bends, through The Chase and on to
the Pit Straight with its typical racetrack joy – high-
speed, high g-force and high on adrenaline.
Or they would have been if it weren’t for the male
model, who it turns out isn’t as at home in a race suit
as he looks. The chiselled chap in question managed
to cross up his 488 coming out of the last bend and
bouncing back into our path, potentially taking out
at least three Ferraris in what would have been
a multi-million-dollar mess.
Mount Panorama is an unforgettable place to
drive fast, but all those crashes you’ve seen on
TV are entirely understandable, because when
it bites, it bites hard.n