The Car Black Un-Ferrari: Shaking Down the P4/5 Competizione

It's a haunting sound�the shriek in the distance of a brand-new prototype race car, alone on a deserted test track in the dead of winter. Muffled behind a rise in the land, the four-cam, 4.0-liter Ferrari V-8 blares. With each finger-snap shift of the sequential gearbox, the engine barks, raw gas detonating like rocket fuel in its blast-furnace-hot exhaust plenum. The sharp reports echo around us like gunfire.

It's early February at Vallelunga, a circuit 40 minutes north of Rome. We're here to witness one of this race weapon's many test sessions. The air is clear, brittle. Hatchet chops of 40-degree wind whack at our faces, the chill soaking in like cold whitewater at a midwinter surfing break.

Suddenly, the machine�the P4/5 Competizione�streaks into view, satin-black, lunging like a bad dog. Jim Glickenhaus, the car's owner, beams. "He's really on it now!" Glickenhaus's smile is sturdy, delighted to underwrite the appalling expense of creating this new car. Yet there is a boyish quality in the smile, too. As a young man, he adored the menacing Ferrari 330P4s and Ford Mark IVs of the Sixties, spiritual progenitors of the P4/5 Competizione. Today, he owns a roadworthy example of each of those immortals. Unthinkably, he drives the priceless yellow former Bruce McLaren/Mark Donohue Ford Mark IV and the only existing Ferrari P3/4 on New York public roads.

With the P4/5C, Glickenhaus means to relive the purity of racing in the mid-Sixties. In those days, a Le Mans entry wasn't allowed to carry sponsor stickers; the simple beauty of the race cars did the advertising. Fittingly, the black-and-white P4/5C sponsor stickers are miniatures aligned beneath the doors. He wants the car to be "free to be beautiful."

The P4/5 Competizione dives into the infield hairpin in front of us. Unpainted, its black corduroy carbon-fiber skin glints in the sun. It has about it a fierce modernity. But blink for an instant, and you'll see the specter of a 1967 Ferrari P4 racing across the legendary biographies of Gurney and Foyt, of Parkes and Scarfiotti.

FROM (RECENT) PAST TO PRESENT

The P4/5C was conceived to win one race: the demonically difficult 24 Hours of the N�rburgring this June, where it will be driven by a four-man team that includes the great Finnish former F1 driver Mika Salo. The car was designed under engineer and project manager Paolo Garella�late of Pininfarina�in four months, from June to September 2010. Taking full advantage of the latest computational fluid dynamics software, the car was conceptualized and fine-tuned in digital space, eliminating the time and huge expense of testing a prototype in the wind tunnel. It is, of course, an evolution of Glickenhaus's Enzo-based Ferrari P4/5 by Pininfarina road car that made its debut in 2006 (Garella held the reins on that project, too). The 2006 P4/5 was conceived as a modern homage to his Ferrari P3/4; today's P4/5C takes this homage one rung higher on the same ladder.

The Competizione is so thoroughly convincing that the aggressive Italian racing magazine Autosprint put the P4/5C on its February cover, identifying it, alongside the 2011 Ferrari F1 car, as one of Maranello's racing weapons for this season. Autosprint couldn't believe the car wasn't covertly executed by the factory.

It was not. The car is 100-percent Glickenhaus's, splitter to Gurney flap. He hired the respected L.M. Gianetti organization and telemetry mavens N.Technology (the two entities teamed up under the name ProTo) to develop the car. Ferrari was annoyed at the confusion but ultimately shut its gums. The P4/5C offers no direct competition to the F430 GTC, Ferrari's GT2-class entry, and will race in the E1-XP2 class (astutely provided by the FIA for wild cards like this one), although it easily could win spectators' hearts with its speed and winsome looks. The fan vote is one competition Ferrari is accustomed to winning, so we could see the prancing horse getting its mane into a twist once more.

As a concession to law and order, however, the P4/5C was designed from the beginning to abide strictly by GT2 rules, even though it won't be homologated per class regs. You'll note that "Ferrari" doesn't appear in the P4/5C's official name, despite the fact that it draws much of its chassis and drivetrain from a Ferrari 430 Scuderia. Initially, the designers planned on using a decade-old Ferrari 333SP chassis and engine as the basis of the P4/5C. But when the team learned that the 24 Hours of the N�rburgring rules allowed neither a carbon-fiber chassis nor the 333SP engine, the donor Scuderia was purchased and its running gear upgraded to full GT2 F430 GTC status (this explains the engine's smaller displacement).

The car carries a GT2 intake restrictor plate, limiting it to 450 hp at 6900 rpm compared with the stock F430's 483 hp at 8500 rpm. (The drivers we spoke with, however, unanimously agreed that the P4/5C positively begs for 200 more hp.) It also will carry a lump of ballast to bring it up to the 2712-pound (1230-kg) GT2 minimum weight. On the plus side, this ballast can be strategically located in the feather-light car to give it better weight distribution. Before being tested, its weight distribution was 40/60 percent, front to rear. At Vallelunga, placing the ballast forward helped the balance, but finding enough front-end downforce proved challenging.

Mounting the P4/5C bodywork to the Scuderia chassis required some fabrication. There was concern that the P4/5C body, closely modeled on the 2006 P4/5 road car, would not fit low enough to look right. The problem was finessed, however, and the P4/5C skin slipped on at the ideal elevation. The P4/5C's sleek shape and narrow Ferrari P4�style greenhouse compensate for its weight and horsepower penalties by providing ample airflow to the GT2-spec rear wing, which generates excellent rear downforce and low drag. Salo told us the rear downforce was so great that traction control is probably unnecessary, and we would think the low power figure and racing tires also help in that regard.