Nope. None. Not in the vein of the Great Old Cars that will only clutter up your yard with their soon-to-be stationary hulks. Unless you're rich enough to have a domesticated mechanic at your beckoned call.
If I had my druthers, I'd see a Ferrari 250 GTO everytime I opened my garage door. However, as I'm really poor, I'd really like to see a Fiat X 1/9, or Alfa Spyder 2000 or Porsche 914. Those are my dreamcars, and I can qualify that by saying that I drive a Subaru WRX STi (graduation present, I'm one of Those bastards.)
The automotive history book to be written someday will have a chapter full of laughs entitled "Tiny Powerless Sports Cars of the Seventies," and it will be a great read. Nobody today, maybe not even Lotus with the Elise, makes a car with the appeal of something like a Porsche 914. It's dreadfully slow in a straight line, but show it a corner and it knows its way around it. That's not to say that it scythes around the corner like a Ferrari F430, but rather that it has a delicacy and poise as it tip-toes around on skinny tires, inviting the driver to test their limits without leaving the road at such a velocity as to punch a hole straight through an orphange. I drove a Fiat X1/9 back in high school, and eventually spun it off the road, just like everybody else who ever drove one, but I spun at about 40mph or so and had slowed to a crawl by the time I actually went off into the weeds I was barely moving. No damage, but the event scared me shitless. If I'd had the same accident in a F360, my corpse would probably still be hanging in some tree.
And the best part of it is, I was Trying to kick the tail out. Probably not a good idea in the first place with such a spin-prone car, but hey, I was eighteen.
My advice to everybody in the car world (whatever it's worth) is to leave the sticker value of huge horsepower to the SUV and musclecar crowd. The original Elise had enough horsepower with the Rover K-series, but of course the demand for more couldn't be ignored by a company hoping to make money. Big, powerful engines require a hefty drivetrain to cope with them, and big heavy brakes to stop all that mass, and big beefy chassis members to support all That mass, and so on and so forth and, next thing you know, you've built a Holden Monaro. Whoops.
So really, with the Elise costing 40,000 Dollars, and no used ones in sight over here in the U.S., I'm keeping my eyes out for a good, used, Alfa Spyder 2000 or 914. They're great little cars, plus you don't ever have to feel like an asshole when you step out of one.
But, to answer the question, I guess that the Zonda is pretty inspiring, the Alfa 8C Competizione (or whatever) more so, but who knows if they'll actually build it.
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Originally Posted by LandQuail
