ME-412 at Laguna Seca: Test Drive:
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08-17-2004, 09:26 PM
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ME-412 at Laguna Seca: Test Drive:
AutoWeek Exec. Editor Kevin A. Wilson
I drove the Chrysler ME412 supercar prototype at Laguna Seca Thursday morning. My first impression. Watch for a more extensive story in a print issue of the magazine later:
We've driven it. It's not only a real car, it's the real deal. Chrysler showed its 850 hp quad-turbo V12 ME Four-Twelve concept car at the Detroit auto show in January and promised we could drive it within the year. The promise has been fulfilled. But it wasn't exactly the show car that did the job.
"When we said that car was a prototype, that was probably a little of bragging on our part," admitted Chrysler Group CEO Dieter Zetche over dinner Wednesday night. "We found out how much harder it was to build a real prototype of a car with this much performance. There are a lot of 24/7 engineering hours on the program. This car, though, is a running prototype."
Indeed it is. Looking stealthy in naked flat black carbon fiber bodywork, it's really a test mule that has been running for about a month, long enough to prove that the target performance figures were real. In Chrysler's own tests, conducted on a 12,000-ft. long runway at an abandoned military airbase (Wurtsmith AFB) at Oscoda, Michigan, the car ran 0-60 mph in 2.9 seconds, to 100 mph in 6.2 seconds (faster than most cars get to 60 mph) and ran a 10.6 second quarter-mile at 136 mph. And it doesn't perform that well only because it's a mule. There's really nothing cobbly about this car...the interior isn't finished with leather and other goodies, the switchgear is makeshift rather than productionized, and you can sometimes hear a minor "clunk" in the carbon-fiber/aluminum composite chassis when you stress the car in a corner, but it's a solid piece of work--but still a little heavier than Chrysler's target.
"These figures are conservative," said Dan Knott, head of the SRT performance operations at DaimlerChrysler's Chrysler Group about the numbers posted at Oscoda. "As with our other performance products, we want to make sure the numbers we claim are numbers that customers can really achieve."
We're not so sure about that in the sense that the numbers really require a good driver with high g-tolerances, but we can say the car is "user friendly" and that most drivers could get an awesome experience even well inside the car's limits.
Given that there is only one mule, that there are 8 other drivers in line this morning (not counting Zetsche or Jochen Mass, who took the turns after the press guys were done), and that we value our own skin, we won't be trying to achieve such dramatic levels of performance here at Laguna. When we arrived, before 8 a.m., the place was well socked-in with fog, but by the time we'd done a walk-around the car and a few laps of orientation in a van driven by a Skip Barber instructor, it had lifted enough to at least see the corners--even the infamous Corkscrew at the top of the hill.
When my turn arrived, I donned the helmet and climbed in beside Herb Helbig, perhaps best known to enthusiasts as the keeper of the Viper flame, and one of several more-than-competent hot shoe development engineers on the project. Herb asked if he would get hazardous duty pay for riding with me--I told him to take it up with SRT operations chief Dan Knott or his boss, Eric Ridenour.
Getting in the car is a bigger chore than it would be for a productionized version. The racing seat is fixed in place, and there's a four-point harness to do up.
Adjust the steering column, eyeball the digital instrument panel that travels up and down with the column, get a feel for the placement of the paddle shifters behind the steering wheel (it's a racing wheel, removable for entry/exit--in production, you'd be able to push the seat back more and tilt the column up for those purposes), place your foot on the brake (it's a two-pedal car) and thumb the red start button.
The 6.0-liter V12 comes to life with a lusty roar. This AMG-built mill, designed specifically for the project, couples to a seven-speed dual clutch transmission with electronically controlled wet clutch, by Ricardo. It will work flawlessly for nearly 3 hours of track time this morning.
For now, at least, initial gear selection is accomplished with a metal dial on the dash that looks like something off a Radio Shack rheostat. There's an N for Neutral and a D for Drive and an R for reverse. There's one notch in between N and D that could be, well, full manual? Race-performance? It's unlabeled on the mule, and they didn't want us playing with it yet.
So we picked "D" and eased into the throttle--you don't just go jumping all over 850 lbs.-ft. of torque in pitlane with people all around. Easing into the experience is advisable, but not too slowly--we'll only get three laps on our first go, and another two later.
The sound as the engine climbs toward its 6200 rpm redline is terrific. Unlike the shrieking sound of, say, an Enzo (we saw three in our first 24 hours on the penninsula), which has the same displacement and cylinder count, this engine has the low-pitched growl of a monster. Routing the exhaust through four turbos has something to do with it, as must the tuning of the system feeding the four pipes that exit at the tail.
On our first laps, we find the chassis solid, the suspension not race-car stiff on this smooth pavement but allowing a tiny little amount of roll and pitch, somewhat similar to other high-performance midengine cars we've driven lately, such as the Ford GT. With an extra 300 hp or so in hand, though, the ME Four-Twelve raises the game on performance.
Steering is responsive, sharp and quick, with a 16:1 ratio, only 2.5 turns lock to lock, despite an excellent (for its class) turning circle of 36 ft. Quick turn-in means you have to be careful not to apex the turns at Laguna too early--it really wants to dive in when you get the line right into the corners.
Once we've got the engine singing, we try the paddle shifter and it responds as quickly as the Enzo's. Since we're not going for any lap records here, though, I figured I'd let it shift for itself most of the time, and it handles the task well. Acceleration is awesome and yet the car doesn't do anything scary--no dancing about, no threatening to jump sideways. It might be that they've got the power dialed back a little to preserve the transmission, but still, you could lose 200 hp and still have more than 600 on tap. Credit the electronic assists and the beefy Michelin Pilot Sport 2s, 265-35-ZR-19s in front, 335/30ZR20s aft for keeping it stuck to the ground.
Downshifts come quickly and cleanly, without a showy double-clutching throttle blip, since the system works without it. They've got it set to downshift for you at 1400 rpm or so, but I pull a few downshifts myself (left paddle) to make sure we get the full charge out of the slower turns. Still, I suspect we're using what would be "street mode" in most such system--a track mode that was quicker to downshift might have shifted down one more gear than I did going into the Corkscrew, for instance.
Or maybe not. The car is deceptively fast, being relatively quiet inside and with such slick aero management around the cockpit, at least, that wind noise is negligible. The tires aren't loud, either, so you look down at the speedo expecting to see a two-digit number starting with 8 and find you're already over 100 mph.
Good thing this puppy can erase velocity. The brakes, six-piston monoblock calipers grabbing 15-inch Brembo CCM (carbon composite matrix) rotors are also on the Enzo level, though the particular tuning on this mule allows a bit too much pedal travel for our tastes. Getting on them hard--Laguna's Turns One and Six are good places to do this early, since being late has dire consequences--lends credibility to Chrysler's claim that it will brake at negative 2.0 gs. You need one of the faster turns--and perhaps a bit more bravery than we can muster behind the wheel of someone else's one-off supercar--to imagine pulling lateral acceleration at the claimed 1.5 g level. I did go fast enough to sense the downforce building and car gaining stick as you went faster, though not until my second stint at the wheel. Chrysler claims 925 lbs of downforce at 186 mph (300 km/h).
As I wrote of the Enzo, this is a car with a lot more in it than I'd get out of it in one morning, but I was also like a kid when the roller-coaster comes to a stop, shouting "again!" The corkscrew will do that for you, if nothing else.
Jochen Mass seemed happy with the car's performance, which must be at the level of some IMSA GTP racers of legend. He said the car is "promising" and that he was particularly impressed that it's distinctive in its own right, a Chrysler and not a copy of something else.
So, is this an experience that might be made available to more than a handful of journalists lucky enough to strap into the mule? It might, says Zetsche, still. One point of having the car at the Monterey weekend is to gauge the potential market for a car of such exotic performance wearing the Chrysler brand. "If we build in units of 10, say 10 to 50 or so, it would be a very high price," he says. "If we build 500 to 1000, which is about the maximum we'd consider, it would be a lower price, of course."
And what has he to say to those who say Chrysler shouldn't be messing around in this territory, that it's too far a departure from its family-mobile strengths?
"Even though Chrysler has not much heritage in racing--it has some, but not as much as some who would be competitors for a car like this--it has more history than many brands have in engineering and innovation. That is what we want to be going back to and I am convinced if we make (the ME Four-Twelve) work, it will be good for the brand."
NOTE: I will post some pictures in a while.
redriderbob
I drove the Chrysler ME412 supercar prototype at Laguna Seca Thursday morning. My first impression. Watch for a more extensive story in a print issue of the magazine later:
We've driven it. It's not only a real car, it's the real deal. Chrysler showed its 850 hp quad-turbo V12 ME Four-Twelve concept car at the Detroit auto show in January and promised we could drive it within the year. The promise has been fulfilled. But it wasn't exactly the show car that did the job.
"When we said that car was a prototype, that was probably a little of bragging on our part," admitted Chrysler Group CEO Dieter Zetche over dinner Wednesday night. "We found out how much harder it was to build a real prototype of a car with this much performance. There are a lot of 24/7 engineering hours on the program. This car, though, is a running prototype."
Indeed it is. Looking stealthy in naked flat black carbon fiber bodywork, it's really a test mule that has been running for about a month, long enough to prove that the target performance figures were real. In Chrysler's own tests, conducted on a 12,000-ft. long runway at an abandoned military airbase (Wurtsmith AFB) at Oscoda, Michigan, the car ran 0-60 mph in 2.9 seconds, to 100 mph in 6.2 seconds (faster than most cars get to 60 mph) and ran a 10.6 second quarter-mile at 136 mph. And it doesn't perform that well only because it's a mule. There's really nothing cobbly about this car...the interior isn't finished with leather and other goodies, the switchgear is makeshift rather than productionized, and you can sometimes hear a minor "clunk" in the carbon-fiber/aluminum composite chassis when you stress the car in a corner, but it's a solid piece of work--but still a little heavier than Chrysler's target.
"These figures are conservative," said Dan Knott, head of the SRT performance operations at DaimlerChrysler's Chrysler Group about the numbers posted at Oscoda. "As with our other performance products, we want to make sure the numbers we claim are numbers that customers can really achieve."
We're not so sure about that in the sense that the numbers really require a good driver with high g-tolerances, but we can say the car is "user friendly" and that most drivers could get an awesome experience even well inside the car's limits.
Given that there is only one mule, that there are 8 other drivers in line this morning (not counting Zetsche or Jochen Mass, who took the turns after the press guys were done), and that we value our own skin, we won't be trying to achieve such dramatic levels of performance here at Laguna. When we arrived, before 8 a.m., the place was well socked-in with fog, but by the time we'd done a walk-around the car and a few laps of orientation in a van driven by a Skip Barber instructor, it had lifted enough to at least see the corners--even the infamous Corkscrew at the top of the hill.
When my turn arrived, I donned the helmet and climbed in beside Herb Helbig, perhaps best known to enthusiasts as the keeper of the Viper flame, and one of several more-than-competent hot shoe development engineers on the project. Herb asked if he would get hazardous duty pay for riding with me--I told him to take it up with SRT operations chief Dan Knott or his boss, Eric Ridenour.
Getting in the car is a bigger chore than it would be for a productionized version. The racing seat is fixed in place, and there's a four-point harness to do up.
Adjust the steering column, eyeball the digital instrument panel that travels up and down with the column, get a feel for the placement of the paddle shifters behind the steering wheel (it's a racing wheel, removable for entry/exit--in production, you'd be able to push the seat back more and tilt the column up for those purposes), place your foot on the brake (it's a two-pedal car) and thumb the red start button.
The 6.0-liter V12 comes to life with a lusty roar. This AMG-built mill, designed specifically for the project, couples to a seven-speed dual clutch transmission with electronically controlled wet clutch, by Ricardo. It will work flawlessly for nearly 3 hours of track time this morning.
For now, at least, initial gear selection is accomplished with a metal dial on the dash that looks like something off a Radio Shack rheostat. There's an N for Neutral and a D for Drive and an R for reverse. There's one notch in between N and D that could be, well, full manual? Race-performance? It's unlabeled on the mule, and they didn't want us playing with it yet.
So we picked "D" and eased into the throttle--you don't just go jumping all over 850 lbs.-ft. of torque in pitlane with people all around. Easing into the experience is advisable, but not too slowly--we'll only get three laps on our first go, and another two later.
The sound as the engine climbs toward its 6200 rpm redline is terrific. Unlike the shrieking sound of, say, an Enzo (we saw three in our first 24 hours on the penninsula), which has the same displacement and cylinder count, this engine has the low-pitched growl of a monster. Routing the exhaust through four turbos has something to do with it, as must the tuning of the system feeding the four pipes that exit at the tail.
On our first laps, we find the chassis solid, the suspension not race-car stiff on this smooth pavement but allowing a tiny little amount of roll and pitch, somewhat similar to other high-performance midengine cars we've driven lately, such as the Ford GT. With an extra 300 hp or so in hand, though, the ME Four-Twelve raises the game on performance.
Steering is responsive, sharp and quick, with a 16:1 ratio, only 2.5 turns lock to lock, despite an excellent (for its class) turning circle of 36 ft. Quick turn-in means you have to be careful not to apex the turns at Laguna too early--it really wants to dive in when you get the line right into the corners.
Once we've got the engine singing, we try the paddle shifter and it responds as quickly as the Enzo's. Since we're not going for any lap records here, though, I figured I'd let it shift for itself most of the time, and it handles the task well. Acceleration is awesome and yet the car doesn't do anything scary--no dancing about, no threatening to jump sideways. It might be that they've got the power dialed back a little to preserve the transmission, but still, you could lose 200 hp and still have more than 600 on tap. Credit the electronic assists and the beefy Michelin Pilot Sport 2s, 265-35-ZR-19s in front, 335/30ZR20s aft for keeping it stuck to the ground.
Downshifts come quickly and cleanly, without a showy double-clutching throttle blip, since the system works without it. They've got it set to downshift for you at 1400 rpm or so, but I pull a few downshifts myself (left paddle) to make sure we get the full charge out of the slower turns. Still, I suspect we're using what would be "street mode" in most such system--a track mode that was quicker to downshift might have shifted down one more gear than I did going into the Corkscrew, for instance.
Or maybe not. The car is deceptively fast, being relatively quiet inside and with such slick aero management around the cockpit, at least, that wind noise is negligible. The tires aren't loud, either, so you look down at the speedo expecting to see a two-digit number starting with 8 and find you're already over 100 mph.
Good thing this puppy can erase velocity. The brakes, six-piston monoblock calipers grabbing 15-inch Brembo CCM (carbon composite matrix) rotors are also on the Enzo level, though the particular tuning on this mule allows a bit too much pedal travel for our tastes. Getting on them hard--Laguna's Turns One and Six are good places to do this early, since being late has dire consequences--lends credibility to Chrysler's claim that it will brake at negative 2.0 gs. You need one of the faster turns--and perhaps a bit more bravery than we can muster behind the wheel of someone else's one-off supercar--to imagine pulling lateral acceleration at the claimed 1.5 g level. I did go fast enough to sense the downforce building and car gaining stick as you went faster, though not until my second stint at the wheel. Chrysler claims 925 lbs of downforce at 186 mph (300 km/h).
As I wrote of the Enzo, this is a car with a lot more in it than I'd get out of it in one morning, but I was also like a kid when the roller-coaster comes to a stop, shouting "again!" The corkscrew will do that for you, if nothing else.
Jochen Mass seemed happy with the car's performance, which must be at the level of some IMSA GTP racers of legend. He said the car is "promising" and that he was particularly impressed that it's distinctive in its own right, a Chrysler and not a copy of something else.
So, is this an experience that might be made available to more than a handful of journalists lucky enough to strap into the mule? It might, says Zetsche, still. One point of having the car at the Monterey weekend is to gauge the potential market for a car of such exotic performance wearing the Chrysler brand. "If we build in units of 10, say 10 to 50 or so, it would be a very high price," he says. "If we build 500 to 1000, which is about the maximum we'd consider, it would be a lower price, of course."
And what has he to say to those who say Chrysler shouldn't be messing around in this territory, that it's too far a departure from its family-mobile strengths?
"Even though Chrysler has not much heritage in racing--it has some, but not as much as some who would be competitors for a car like this--it has more history than many brands have in engineering and innovation. That is what we want to be going back to and I am convinced if we make (the ME Four-Twelve) work, it will be good for the brand."
NOTE: I will post some pictures in a while.
redriderbob
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