Ferrari California 30: Less is more

An additional 30bhp, a reduction in weight of 30kg – those are the bare figures that give Ferrari’s latest California its ‘30’ suffix. But, statistics apart, how does driving the new car hood-down in late autumn measure up?

In 2008, the California broke new ground for the Italian company when it married a front/mid-engined layout with an electrically retractable hardtop, twin-clutch 7-speed gearbox, generous space (or seating for children) behind the front seats and a commodious boot.
The car was marketed as having more ‘accessible’ performance, easy for everyone to drive, yet still packed with Ferrari DNA. When we experienced the original version (in 2009 and 2012 in the UK - SW) it felt like any Ferrari should: very fast, exciting to drive and packed with practical personality. ‘Slow’ it most definitely was not. So now, with 490bhp/505Nm torque, how much better is it than the original? And is the optional handling package fitted to this car (faster steering, electronically controlled dampers and stiffer suspension) a step too far?



The quick answer to the latter is ‘yes’... and ‘no’. ‘Yes’ for the stop-start crawl out of the centre of Zurich, and most definitely ‘no’ for the country road journey to Einsiedeln, just a short drive away in the canton of Schwyz.
It’s mid-November. Snow is in the air. With a warm coat, though, roof-down motoring is more than merely ‘possible’, it’s a pleasure. Turn your collar (and the heater) up and enjoy the charismatic barks, bangs, screams and coughs of the Ferrari V8, as the gearbox makes lightning-quick downshifts and the exhaust note echoes around the valley.


Only in Italy could such a tremolo riff be picked with such consummate style. With a little practice, the California can be played as fast as Eddie Van Halen does his Ibanez Destroyer. The throttle response matches the super-quick (21st Century Ferrari) steering. The smallest input is enough to wheel the car round tight bends or through long, sweeping curves. And the sportier suspension seems the equal of the very top, super-high-performance cars from Maranello. All that said, the California 30 is an easy car to drive – without being predictable or boring.


Hood-up, the car is another classic Ferrari berlinetta. It sprints from zero to 100km/h (62mph) in just 3.8 seconds. It then goes on to 312km/h, exhausts roaring all the while; a very fast car indeed. So far so good, you might say – a typical Ferrari road test, in homage to the marque. Well, some would say that the styling is not perfect, the interior a touch cluttered and the rear seats impractical.
But others would rejoice in its compact dimensions, its speed and charisma, its sheer ‘Ferrariness’ - and we’d be among that latter group.

Text & Photos: Jan Baedeker from Classicdriver.com
Classic Driver has an unparallelled selection of new and classic Ferraris for sale in the Classic Driver Marketplace.

Exposed: Through the lens of Bryan Adams

Amy Winehouse, Mick Jagger, Mickey Rourke… if you want to see the heroes of rock ’n’ roll and the silver screen up close, you need the right name. Bryan Adams, for example (yes, THAT Bryan Adams). 

Not only is the man a great musician, but a great photographer too, and there’s nothing quite as useful as personal fame when it comes to recording the intimate lives of the stars – a subject which has always fascinated the masses. What better way to capture images of publicity-shy superheroes than to be a participant as well as a photographer? Bryan Adams is by no means the first musician to experiment with the visual arts: Bob Dylan, Patti Smith and Bryan Ferry are among those who did likewise.



Talking about the beginnings of his passion for photography, Adams explains that his inspiration, in the mid-Seventies, were concert photos of the Beach Boys, a friend in the bathroom, his mother, his piano – “just casual things” that were all around him. Later, the things around him became celebrities such as Amy Winehouse, Mick Jagger, Michael Jackson, Ben Kingsley, Mickey Rourke and Victoria Beckham. Adams was even chosen in 2002 to photograph Queen Elizabeth II.

To Adams, it is important not to fall into a routine. “I believe that if you do the same thing every day again and again, you get tired of it. If the scenery changes now and again it’s good for everything you do – you see things in a fresh light.” Some 150 photographs are on display in the exhibition titled ‘Bryan Adams – Exposed’, at the NRW-Forum in Dusseldorf from 2 February 2013.

Further Information Further information regarding the Bryan Adams – Exposed exhibition at the NRW-Forum in Düsseldorf can be found at www.nrw-forum.de. Text: Jan Baedeker

Photos: Bryan Adams
from classicdriver.com

great war coloriage

fom pilllpat (agence eureka)

Ménage à beef:Rib-eye Three Ways

There’s more than one way to skin a cat, the saying goes. The same is true for cooking a steak. Most of the time the way we cook at home is dictated by circumstance: grill when the weather permits; pan fry if it doesn’t (or if we live in an apartment); broil, uh, when the oven’s looking appealing; and cook sous-vide during wet dreams.

The cooking medium plays an important role in the end product: the texture, the way it tastes and the ease with which it arrives at the desired done-ness. So while weather and your kitchen gear may often dictate your dinner plans, it’s a good idea to know your cooking options — remember, you are the master of your own beefy destiny.

With the GP crew assembled and hungry, we cooked three ribeyes available from Heritage Foods USA — two Wagyu steaks (Akaushi-Angus cross) and one from a White Oak Pastures grass-fed Angus cow — to see how three different methods stacked up.

A Month of Beef three-way, after the jump.

Rib-eye is a well-marbled steak, cut from the center of the rib roast that sits on top of the rib primal. With Wagyu the marbling is even more pronounced. Because it has such great fat content, our goal was to cook it to medium-rare, further along the done-ness scale than we might cook a super lean strip steak or tenderloin. The idea is to melt down the fat, which won’t happen if the steak is still cool in the middle.

Beef science lesson of the day: fat is also less conductive than muscle fibers. This means that the steak will cook marginally slower than a very lean cut and give us a little more room for error. However, the internal temperature of any steak moves quickly over fire, so in all cases we’d prefer to undercook and return to heat if needed (a wise lesson), rather than overcooking and returning to the table with piece of meat resembling charcoal.

Grilled

The ideal steak will be brown and crispy on the outside, pink and juicy on the inside. We grilled the steak over an open gas flame, which is hot enough to brown the meat (also called the Maillard reaction) very quickly. The point here is to develop a char and not, as is dubiously claimed, to seal in the juices. The browning reaction gives the nutty, savory, earthy and complex flavors that we identify with a classically great steak. After searing the steak on both sides, we moved it away from the direct flame and closed the grill. This second step is key to giving yourself a longer window in which to hit the medium-rare mark. Cooking the steak over high heat the entire time it’s on the grill can result in an overcooked outside and undercooked inside.

Note: Some cooks will suggest reversing the order of the two-step process, which is to say cooking the steak over low heat first and then searing at the end. The logic is that the steak is already hot and will sear much more quickly. This is a good idea; but our concern is that it leaves no room for error. If the steak is near medium-rare by the time it hits a super hot flame, the likelihood of overcooking seems high.

Pros: Nice grill marks, smokey flavor, man credit, possibility of cigar smoking while cooking high.

Cons: Easy to overcook if you don’t observe the two-step process.

Broiled

Broiling is essentially reverse-grilling: cooking the steak in the oven on high heat, on a pan near the heat source at the top of the oven with the oven door ajar, and flipping half-way through cooking. In theory, this makes sense, but in practice it’s a little more difficult. We were able to achieve the desired level of doneness, but we didn’t get the char we had hoped for.

Pros: Simplest method to execute.

Cons: Hard to get desired char.

Cast Iron’d

Next to grilling, this was our favorite method for cooking a ribeye. The method is simple: heat a cast iron pan or griddle over high heat, add a thin layer of oil (it should smoke), sear steak on both sides. Like grilling, this is a two-step process. After flipping the steak, we put the whole pan in the oven set to 350 degrees. The bottom of the steak browns, plus the radiant heat of the oven gives us the ability to cook the steak evenly and more slowly than over a flame.
Pros: Nice crust, with a very rich flavor from cooking in its own fat. Two-step process helps prevent overcooking.

Cons: Smokey kitchen (and not in the good way, like the grill).

Thoughts on Done-ness

These methods are only as good as the cook employing them, and in the end, the most important thing about a steak is that it’s cooked to the desired level of done-ness. Some people use a meat thermometer, but the accuracy on a relatively thin cut of meat (as opposed to a roast) is questionable: it’s hard to match exactly where the thermometer is measuring to the center of the steak. A better method is to touch it, poke it and sniff it. Rare meat is said to feel like the muscle between thumb and forefinger then the fingers are stretched apart. Another way is to cut into it, which will leak some juices, but only locally. Remember: You can always throw a steak back on the grill — our pan-fried steak went back in the oven — but overdone is game over.