The Good Oil: Designs on a career with Ferrari

Ferrari 458 GTO

The Ferrari 458 provides a good starting point for Steve Morfouasse.

Back when The Good Oil was at school, crude scribbles of cars were about the best we ever managed. This was largely thanks to short-sighted teachers insisting we pay attention to whatever subject they were teaching, cruelly cutting short what could have been a sparkling career in car design.

It seems, however, that a teenager from Lamballe in France has done somewhat better than us in his design attempts - 17-year-old Steve Morfouasse recently spent more than 200 hours designing a 14-page brochure, and a number of renderings, of a car that celebrates the 30th anniversary of the legendary Ferrari 288 GTO.

Morfouasse's design is based on a Ferrari 458 with 288-inspired design cues and a twin-turbo V8 with a theoretical 522kW.

"For the 30 years of the Ferrari 288 GTO, I wanted to revive in the most accurate manner possible the myth GTO," Morfouasse told carscoops.com. "In addition, there are many fans who love this model that was a turning point in the history of Ferrari. So I chose the 458 that seemed to be the most appropriate model for this declension."

And with the use of that word he also proves he is way smarter than The Good Oil was at 17. Although, he probably would have got beaten up a lot at my school, especially for using words like "declension".

Lullaby for diesel fans

How do you know when you have spent too much time around diesel engines? Probably when you need something like this ...

YouTube user crysknife007 has a number of different ambient sounds, looped for 12 hours (yes, really!) to be used as soothing background noise for those who have difficulty nodding off.

They range from the sound of a train rumbling over the tracks, to whales singing and even, for the nerdy insomniac, engine and bridge noises from famous fictional spaceships like the USS Enterprise.

But the best one for those with diesel running through their veins has to be the sound of a big diesel truck engine idling. For 12 hours.

Now, The Good Oil freely admits to being somewhat sceptical to the soothing powers of a rumbling diesel, but we left it going while writing this column and fell asleep 12 times ...
Check it out here: http://bit.ly/1zdRjFv

We are the world
• During a public holiday in China, traffic regulators allowed sedan drivers to use toll highways for free in order to smooth out the traffic flow. This gave one enterprising ute owner an idea, and in order to take advantage of the free toll roads he cunningly disguised his Great Wall as a sedan. Just not a very good one, as the police quickly picked him up and fined him.

• A taxi driver in New York's Bronx may be the toughest man alive - the unnamed cabbie was recently robbed by an armed robber and shot, twice. This did not stop him from chasing the robber down and running him over. Despite being pinned to a fence, the robber escaped. Probably to live in fear that the taxi driver will one day track him down ...

Chasing down the ghost car

The screen is 98 per cent transparent.

Anyone who has played a racing game knows what a "ghost car" is - and it's not what frightened Chief Wiggum and Homer in The Simpsons when Marge turned her headlights off. It is, of course, the see-through, drive-through car that represents the fastest lap on a particular track.

Now a self-proclaimed "racing enthusiast and high performance driving instructor" wants to bring the ghost car into real life with an augmented reality HUD.

Justin Hayes is the man behind High Rise Garage, a company seeking funding on Kickstarter to turn "GhostDash" into a reality.

GhostDash features a 98 per cent transparent screen on which a driver can see a ghost car projection running its last lap. The display also shows current speed, the gap and lap times.

"We believe HUDs and ghost cars are the next step in utilising the data racers collect to make it easier and safer," Mr Hayes told US website Autoblog.

The raw data comes from a GPS unit that sends information to a Windows device, which turns it into an image. A projector then displays the HUD on a 15-inch screen that hangs in front of the driver.

Now if only someone could make our other favourite feature of racing games reality - the ability to brake from ridiculously high speeds by using the back of the car in front and getting away with no damage.

Mazda keen on slice of the action

The Kodo Chair is Mazda's first foray into the high-end lifestyle product market.

High-end luxury and supercar makers have always been happy to plaster their name over almost any kind of "lifestyle" product, with Ferrari being particularly good at whoring its name out for a quick buck (I mean, Ferrari golf shoes? Really?) and Bugatti is REALLY good at charging thoroughly massive prices for anything its name goes on (a $100,000 belt buckle! Really!), but when you sell million-dollar cars, we guess you can get away with it.

But now it seems that Mazda want a taste of this high-end consumer cash-cow action and is said to be considering its own line of luxury goods under the "Mazda Design" brand. Mazda's design boss Ikuo Maeda is said to have backing of CEO Masamichi Kogai, according to Automotive News.

The Mazda Design brand was previewed by the Kodo Chair that appeared at last year's Milan Design Week, which is a really cool chair. But it will be an uphill battle to get the line established and taken seriously - after all, it's not like THEY sell million-dollar supercars to extremely wealthy individuals to whom dropping a couple of grand on a fancy chair means, almost, nothing ...

Number Crunching

23 NZ$
The price in the Ferrari Store for a rubber keyring.
23,180 NZ$
The price in the Ferrari Store of a 1:1 scale replica of the nose of a 1962 268 SP GT racing car.
89NZ$
The price in the Ferrari Store of the Official Ferrari Magazine.
2900 NZ$
The price in the Ferrari Store of the LaFerrari sunglasses.