my new uncle who let me rip the Z4 is good friends with a gentleman named Rupert Buchsteiner, former tech director for Fernando Alonso’s F1 team when with Minardi (i dont folow F1 so i dont know when that was)
we were supposed to meet with Rupert yesterday morning at his new place of employment, new platform director for Ferrari… yeah.
we are in Modena now and yesterday morning we made the trip to Ferrari in Maranello. we called him in the morning and made contact with him, he said to give him a couple hours and he would meet us.
in the interim we visited the Ferrari Museum and all their official stores, the plant is incredible and the ferrari workers were everywhere… it really was unbelievable to be that close and to see how the corporate culture is at ferrari, most of the exec’s (men adn women) were dressed to teh nine’s for their day at work and there were incredible cars everywear… ferarri’s i had never seen before.
we sat in the lobby of the factory for an hour afterwards watching company videos etc. but Rupert, in the end was not able to meet us so we didnt get teh factory tour, which is reserved only for multiple ferrari owners.
it was a close call, and we got mad close… but it wasnt to be.
other cool shit has happened here in Italy though… met up and went to dinner with a dude from Ziptied who owns teh only S chassis car i have seen in all of Europe so far…
my 2gb card is almost full of pics and vids.
leavig modena for milan in an hour then back to france.
Bing, and well, everyone for that matter… If you want to see s-chassis’ in Europe, try to make the trip next year to Sweden for Japmeet, there were probably more then 300 cars there, 85% of which are S13/S14.
second pic is me with my uncle who is the designer at Magna Steyr and his son, my new cousin who is a contract designer for them, basically just photoshops images of actual cars and gets paid for it.
last pics is me goofing around in it before going for a rip in it… video will be a while befor ei upload it.
the car looks only cosmetically different and with new tails but while we were out driving i was told that the entire car was ripped apart and reinforced… in fact, even the dudes at Magna couldnt get the airbags to work after ripping it apart and putting it back together again.
the car had the SMG paddle shift, i dont like it at all… felt very disconnected from the engine in between shifts when the revs were catching up.
it will take me weeks to get all the pics up, i am just going to start with some of the goofier ones.
In venice, Italy playing with the pigeons
melissa accidentally made some of the pics black and white.
hey pigeon dudes, whats up?
OMG THEY ARE EATING ME!
i have a video of this that i will host pretty soon, its pretty good stuff.
actaully. moments before those photos were taken a pigeon shit right on my head… not joking.
i had to run into a cafe bathroom and wipe it out of my hair, well actually melissa got most of it with some kleenex but i had to get the real junk that got in there
just a couple more interesting pics that i took while in Europe
this one was out of a clothing catalogue in Graz
I guess they idolize our interprovincial highway system?
I have no idea what this sign is saying
if you guys have ever played this game:
Metal Slug
I found it in a train station in Modena, blew like $5 in there… one of the coin slots didnt work and i ended up accidentally playing both characters at the same time twice.
Under the Z4 in the driveway you can see a bunch of wood, it is the entrance way to an old bombshelter that is underground and connects a bunch of the houses in the area.
we went down there… it was pretty freaky. look at the second pic, some dude 50 years ago wrote something about Hitler and Stalin. the phrase in the 3rd picture means ‘death around the corner’
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