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Originally posted by Sennake
Die stunt is al meermaals uitgevoerd en altijd wint de racewagen omdat de af te leggen afstand zodanig gekozen wordt dat de jet net tekort komt.
Herinner u Gilles Villeneuve die tegen een F 104 Starfighter won met een Ferrari, en ook Greg Moore die in een Player's Indycar won tegen een F18 Hornet dacht ik...
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Een anekdote over Gilles Villeneuve m.b.t. dat wedstrijdje:
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In November 1981 Gilles Villeneuve, in the turbocharged Ferrari 126C, took on a
Starfighter at Istrana – and beat it over a kilometre from a standing start. That season he had won with the car at Monaco and Jarama, but when we spoke on the phone, the day after the race with the plane, he reckoned the car had at last found its true metier.
“No corners!” he laughed. “All season long I’ve been looking for a track with no bloody corners – something to suit a shitbox with a lot of horsepower…”
Gilles being Gilles, the first thing he had done, of course, was have the wings removed from the Ferrari. Stood to reason that in a contest of pure straightline speed, it was going to be quicker without them. I said yes, I could see that, but… hadn’t it made the car a touch unstable? “Yes,” he said.
I have some video of that dayat Istrana. The tifosi simply worshipped Villeneuve, and a huge number of folk turned out to watch him. At the end of each run he would brake down from 190mph,orwhateverit was,then flickthe carsideways,and layon a numberofburn-outs and ‘donuts’. They went home very happy.
The steering had got a little light, Gilles admitted, but he thought the Starfighter pilot far braver. “Jesus Christ, it scared me just sitting in it on the ground!” he said, and it was true that these aeroplanes did indeed have something of a poor reputation, in the sense that they tended to take off rather more
“Any time you drive out of there on Sunday afternoon,” Bobby Rahal once said of the Michigan International Speedway, “you’ve won…”The Starfighter was a little like that.
On one occasion, Villeneuve had been told, a pilot had been forced to make an emergency landing on the pit straight of the old autodromo at Modena,which forcountless years served as the test track for Ferrari, Maserati and others.
“Theyfixed the plane,”said Gilles,“but then the problem was, how to get it out out of there. If it had been anywhere else, I guess they’d have taken the wings off, or something, and put it on the back of a truck. But this was Italy, and so they decided to fly it out!”
The track in Modena is now sadly long gone, but I went there a few times, and have a picture of it in my mind. Originally, it was the site of a military airfield, built during the Second World War,and bymeans ofjoining up the runways a circuit came into being. Known officially as the Modena Aeroautodromo, it was inaugurated in 1950, with an F1race, won by the Ferrari of Alberto Ascari.
It was a short circuit, around a mile and a half, and almost an oval, save for an S-bend before the first left-hand turn. Remarkably, too, it was situated right in the centre of the city – indeed, in Giulio Cabianca’s fatal testing accident there in 1961, his Cooper-Maserati went through the gates, and finished up in the morning rush-hour traffic, miraculously without serious injury to anyone else.
Back to the Starfighter, and its intrepid pilot. Once the decision had been taken to fly it out, a certain amount of planning seemed like a good idea. The place may have been christened an ‘aeroautodromo’, but it’s
unlikely anyone had foreseen the arrival – scheduled or otherwise – of a jet fighter.
According to what Villeneuve had been told, calculations were soon dispensed with, and it was decided simply to ‘wing it’. Thus, the pilot tooled down the pit straight, building up a little speed, wisely by-passed the S-bend, then went through the first and second turns as quickly as he dared.
“Then,” said Gilles, “apparently he just floored it – and I guess he was praying at the same time. They told me he just got it off the ground in time, j-u-s-t scraped over the wall.”
When was it done? I asked. “Oh,” said Gilles. “Very early in the morning. I mean, they didn’t want to try it when there was traffic around…”
bron: Autosport issue 18/25 december, fifth column Nigel Roebuck
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Kijk dat zijn de verhalen die we graag lezen 
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Last edited by Mark; 22-12-2003 at 00:40.
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13-12-2003, 00:52
