Ferrari Mondial . Net

The Auto Italia spring show at the historic Brooklands motor racing circuit is always the first major show of the year, held on the early May bank holiday weekend. The weather had been very temperamental so I had been glued to the weather forecast for the preceding week, but my fears were unfounded, the prediction was for a warm sunny day, and I awoke very early that morning to glorious sunshine.

The reason for getting up so early was to meet up with a convoy of approximately 55 Ferraris at the Hilton hotel near Brooklands and then to head into the circuit in a convoy to enter the circuit via Mercedes Benz world, thus beating the rush and jams that can occur at this popular event, especially when the weather is favourable. On arriving at the meeting point we were not disappointed, the entire car park was full of Ferraris, including a brand new Ferrari California in light blue. It’s definitely a departure from the sleek Ferrari designs of the past, with a rather more chunky front and rear end. I’ll pass on giving a my verdict on the design until I’ve seen, and hopefully heard, a Rosso red one in the flesh

Once inside Brooklands there was a great display of a variety of Italian cars, no doubt boosted by the favourable weather forecast. Some highlights included an original Ferrari P3 330 Le Mans racer, the above mentioned Ferrari California, an F50 (rare enough as it is) in an unusual graphite colour, matching Ferrari F430 Scuderia 16M spyder and berlinetta, a Ferrari 365 berlinetta boxer (easily mistaken for the slightly more common but equally beautiful 512BBi), a Ferrari 166 Barchetta (the 44th Ferrari ever made), and a 1930s Alpha Romeo (an original P3?) racer badged with Enzo Ferrari’s prancing horse shield, and a rare Alfa Romeo 8C ompetizione, I have to say it did look good. Whilst eating ice creams in the sunshine and goggling all the great cars on show I looked round to see none other than radio DJ, and avid Ferrari collector, Chris Evans chomping on a cigar as he pulled up with his wife in his £5.4million Ferrari 250 California. If that wasn’t enough he was closely followed by a friend driving a white Ferrari 288 GTO (I presume also owned by Mr Evans!), complete with baby Evans Jr in a baby seat as the passenger.

On top of all the fabulous Italian cars on display the Brooklands museum itself is well worth looking round. Some of the old racing cars they have (from around 1900-1940) are stunning, like the 24 litre Napier racer (yes 24 litre… mpg and CO2 emissions anyone?), and you won’t see cars like these in many other places in the world. There was also a Formula 1 exhibition which had Frentzen’s Jordan car, as well as Senna’s classic Malboro McLaren, this one was a demonstration car that never actually raced, but was used in promotion, so probably had the man himself pose with it for media photos at some point. Also in this exhibition, but sadly temporarily out of order, was a sit in computer simulation of driving the original Brooklands circuit. The driver initially gets a lap in a virtual Formula 1 car, but for the second lap this is replaced by a car with typical handling characteristics of a 1930s racer… we were reliably told that whilst people complete the first lap with ease, most people crash almost immediately on the second lap. Obviously car handling has improved a lot in almost a century

The ticket to the AutoItalia show also lets you leave the Brooklands complex and take the short walk to Mercedes-Benz world. This was the first time I had been and I can say it’s well worth the visit. There are some pristine, classic Mercedes-Benzs on display, including a 300SL Gull wing Coupe, and the 1970s dictators’ (Idi Amin, etc) favourite car, the 600. You can also browse, and even buy, the latest Mercedes-Benz and Smart car range, plus out the back there is a mini race circuit and wet skidpan where you can watch professional and novice drivers putting the cars through their paces. If you are feeling brave you can pay to either be taken round by a pro in an AMG, or actually have a go yourself. Booking in advance may be best if you want to do this as it seemed very popular. For the less adventurous there is plenty of picnic space, and an indoor viewing area in case the weather isn’t so great, to watch the cars from. Mercedes-Benz world is a slightly mad place, it’s a museum, new car show room, and driving experience school all rolled into one!

This very early spring outing had been planned by the top guys at the Wheels in Motion wheel alignment centre and the Ferrari Owners’ Club. Basically turn up in your Ferrari and you got a free wheel alignment and geometry check using the latest state of the art equipment. As luck would have it the weather was very pleasant for the time of year so it was an ideal opportunity to take my newly acquired black Ferrari 348ts out for it’s first public event. With the weather being so unexpectedly good there was a big turnout, I was lucky to be squeezed in for a wheel check. I was a little apprehensive, as with my 348 having had 355 wheels fitted at some point in it’s life there could be potential for them not having been fitted and aligned properly. My worries were unfounded as the Wheels in Motion team found only minor, run of the mill, slight misalignments which would only affect the handling if I were doing any serious track days, so I’ll put it on my list of things to do. A big thanks to everyone at Wheels in Motion for all their help, free tests and hosting such a good outing.

I thought this was worth a post, well done for my co-pilot getting this well timed snap of a momentous occasion… the 40000 mile mark for my ’85 Mondial! Remind me to dust my dashboard before I get to 50k miles

Ok so it’s a bit off topic for this blog but I do love gadgets, though one thing I’ve never been much good at is keeping pace with mobile phone technology. However the joystick of my trusty Sony Ericsson K700i (which I’ve had for the last three and a half years) finally gave up the ghost so it was time to delve once more into probably the most rapidly evolving field of electronics. I thought I’d stick with a Sony Ericsson as I’ve had four in the past and they all survived my ownership pretty well, the K700 being the first and only one to actually break: ultimately the joystick module letting it down. Also I’m no fan of Nokia, the very word conjures up an image of a leopard print Nokia 3210, definitely phones for the ladies. The Apple iPhone doesn’t impress me either, mainly due to it’s cost (bearing in mind phones are easy to drop and lose) and the annoyance of having to use the hideous iTunes software.

The current line up of Sony Ericsson phones is immense, whereas in the past there was usually one obvious model to go for in my price range now there were roughly six: K800i, K850i, W580i, W760i, W850i, W910i, making it a difficult choice, mainly based on seeing which one had the most pointless features that I would most likely never use. I did, however, like the idea of a Walkman phone so that I could ditch my ancient iPod mini (and un-install iTunes), and the sleek, slide out Sony Ericsson W760i stood out for me as it’s one of the first generation of phones to have a global positioning system (GPS) receiver built in, hence the relevance of this post to my blog!

The phone should ship with Googlemaps, and WayFinder satellite navigation software for driving, but both of these had been stripped off the phone by my network supplier O2 for some reason. Anyway it wasn’t long before I had Google maps installed, and also amAze GPS which beats the pay monthly subscription WayFinder satnav software, as amAze GPS is completely free! nav4All is also free and looks a good SatNav application but doesn’t seem to detect the internal GPS receiver in the W760, hopefully they will fix this soon and it will be another option. Getting a lock with the phone on the GPS signal can take a couple of minutes, it doesn’t like being inside or in a location surrounded by tall buildings, and you may need to be stationary, but once it’s got a lock it hangs on to it pretty well. One thing to watch out for is the map image data for both apps must be downloaded dynamically as you move around, this can be costly if you are paying for your data, luckily I’m on an old Genie SIM which has free data, albeit over a slow GSM 9.6k modem dial up. To sum up the software isn’t as good as my TomTom One, and using the W760 is a lot more clunky than the dedicated satnav, but as a backup or emergency plan I think it will come in handy, and it’s certainly good for using if navigating somewhere unfamiliar by foot. The phone also comes with a fitness application called Tracker which logs your route when running or walking, calculates energy used, and also tracks your progress by comparing route results over weeks or months. A cool thing you can do with any stored route (whether by recorded by foot or other means) is to export it as a gpx file and load it into Google Earth which will then map it onto the globe for you.

As mentioned above the phone inherits the famous Sony Walkman name, so it’s also packed with media features, such as an Mp3 player, video player, photo viewer (3.2 megapixel camera is built in, no flash or auto focus though), FM RDS radio receiver, and the usual collection of games that you will load up just to see if they have managed to squeeze a Playstation onto a mobile phone… as you would guess they have still not managed it! The phone can also be used to make calls, though I’ve not quite worked that one out yet…

Some tips I would give are:

• Get a bigger memory card, the phone comes with a 1gig card but you will soon use this up if you start using it as a media player, and you can get an 8 gigabyte Micro M2 card for about £15 now!
• to do use the included Sony Media Manager program to transfer your mp3/aac files to the phone, it won’t needlessly re-encode them all, but will add the album art where possible, and also add “SensMe” information so that the phone can automatically create play lists of songs based on your mood. Sounds cheesy but actually works reasonably well.
• To perform video encoding you have to pay £7 for a serial number to upgrade you to Sony Media Manager Pro, which is a bit cheeky of Sony Ericsson, however, the media manager software makes life very easy. Having said that I’m having issues at the moment with trying to encode Windows Media Center recorded TV files (.dvr-ms) which is the whole reason I forked out the £7, encoding seems to freeze. There are alternatives such as M3 and SUPER, but these can be a bit tricky for someone not hot on their video encoding, and M3 has issues with Windows Vista, especially Windows Vista 64.
• A really important point to note is that some of the earlier versions of this phone had issues with mp3 playback freezing randomly for a few seconds, alarms not working and also random phone crashes. I did notice the very occasional pauses in mp3 playback when I got my phone so promptly installed the Sony Ericsson Update Manager software that came on the installation CD. It duly informed me that there was a later version of the firmware available, so I let the application install it and I have to say the phone has been rock solid ever since. It’s a good thing to check this before getting too many settings and other data on the phone as upgrading the firmware completely wipes the phone’s memory (but not the memory card), though you can back up contacts, calendar, text messages and a few other things easily using the phone sync software also on the install CD.

Overall I’m really impressed with this phone, it always amazes me that the gadgets of today would have been the stuff of a madman’s dreams just a few years ago.