Vintage and Exotic Car Restoration - The Duel: Ferrari F40 vs. Porsche 959 - FZ Restoration - 925-294-5666

 

PHOTO: Brendan McAleer, Driving

 Pistols at dawn! They were two of the most powerful supercars ever made, a brace of weaponry intended to do battle in Group B, possibly the deadliest racing series ever conceived. Both these warriors carried a rampant stallion as part of their heraldry, but the battle-lines were drawn along ideologies as well as homelands.

On one hand, the Ferrari F40 was a screaming menace, a car born phoenix-like from the ashes of a failed racing program. The last car to be personally touched by the coldly calculating mind of Enzo Ferrari himself, it was a widowmaker forged of carbon-fibre, kevlar, and high-revving horsepower.

The Ferrari F40 was designed to celebrate Ferrari’s 40th anniversary.
wikimedia, Driving

At the other end of the field, the Porsche 959 represented relentlessly Germanic engineering, combining twin-turbo power with clever all-wheel drive and a slippery shape. At home enduring LeMans or racing across the Egyptian desert past the pyramids, it was a technological tour-de-force with a top-speed of 317km/h.

They should have met in the field, in the hands of skilled racers with thousands of hours of track-time under their helmets. Instead, twenty-five years ago, the F40 and the 959 clashed with 10-year-olds at the helm, thanks to the efforts of a small gaming studio in Vancouver BC. It was one of the greatest supercar face-offs of all time, and it coincided with the birth of the videgame industry. Today, you can pilot any number of cars in Forza or Gran Turismo.

 

The Porsche 959 was also conceived of as a glimpse of what the future might hold for the 911.
wikimedia, Driving

Back then, Test Drive II told you to choose your weapon, and The Duel was on.

Some years before that, a puzzled-looking Pierre Berton furrows his brow at a failed guess on Front Page Challenge. It’s 1983, and while the four journalists assembled to field the challenge are erudite and well-educated, they’ve just encountered a generation gap. “Don’t video games turn your brains to mush?” one asks.

Don Mattrick and Jeff Sember grin at the question. The pair have just successfully brought their first creation, Evolution, to market, earning enough cash to put a Supra in Mattrick’s driveway and a Z/28 Camaro in Sember’s. University’s been paid for too.

It’s the first mass-marketed video game in Canada, and its name befits a burgeoning growth that will see Vancouver become an eventual epicentre for game development. Mattrick will eventually buy out Sember, and their company, Distinctive Software Inc., will be acquired by Electronic Arts, becoming EA Canada.

Today, EA Canada has a huge campus out in Burnaby, employing approximately 1300 people as the largest and oldest studio in EA’s global operations.

Back in the early 1980s, Brad Gour, son of the local zone manager for Volkswagen, Audi, and Porsche, showed up at DSI to an interview that he thought was going to be little more than a chat amongst early computer hobbyists.

“When I arrived,” he says, “Don Mattrick’s Porsche 944 was outside with the word ‘Evolve’ on the personalized plates.”

Having grown up around the latest from Germany rotating through the driveway on a regular basis, Gour was something of a gearhead, and a perfect fit for the growing company.

The first iteration, Test Drive, was quite primitive, but brought something revolutionary to the table. For the first time in a game, the player was seated in a point-of-view position behind the wheel, looking out through an electronic windscreen. The inspiration came from a recording made in that same 944, driving the old Sea-to-Sky up to Whistler, with the cliffside on the right and Howe Sound to the left. Several cars were selectable, including a Ferrari Testarossa or a Porsche 930, but the driver raced against the clock, not an opponent.

“It was the most amazing thing I’d ever done, and I was hooked immediately.” For Erik Kiss, working on getting The Duel to run on the Apple IIGS was a dream job. “I started at DSI while in my third year of university, trying to earn the degree I’d assumed would be necessary for a boring career in banking or some other lame, but computer-related, work.” It turned out to be the entry point into more than two decades of work in the gaming industry, including founding his own company and launching a cart-style racing game.
He wasn’t the only young gun to come aboard DSI for the project. In fact, when Kris Hatelid, main programmer on the Commodore 64 version and composer of The Duel’s in-game music came to Vancouver, he had an embarrassing admission to make. “I didn’t have my driver’s license when I wrote that game,” he says, “At some point, Don flies me up to see the progress I’d been making. I get to the office and he offers to loan me a car, and I have to explain that I don’t drive. Pretty awkward.”

The hours were long, though the work was rewarding. Amory Wong, now a high school teacher at Carson Graham in North Vancouver says of the process, “At the time, we didn’t have very large teams, so each of the lead programmers did a lot. [We] had to code, make builds, and do a lot of testing. We also didn’t have much in the way of project managers, so it was just up to the team to get it done.”

While by modern standards, The Duel is somewhat blocky and archaic, every effort was made to provide a very high level of realism. This extended to recording audio from actual cars to get the sound just right, even though it would be compressed and then played out through 1980s computer speakers.

“Recording actual car noises is pretty standard now, but at the time it felt like an extravagance,” says Bruce Dawson, one of two programmers working on the Amiga version of Test Drive II, “Don Mattrick was supposed to go pick up the Ferrari [a 308] but he got busy with some paperwork. I picked up the car, did the audio recording, and then put as many miles on it as possible. I dropped by my little brother’s place to show him my ‘new car’ and generally had fun. I accidentally kept it past the closing time of the rental agency so I had to find a safe place to park it overnight. I ended up sleeping in the car just to make sure nothing happened to it. That was a good day.”

By and large, the rest of the programming passed without incident, and Test Drive II shipped to homes all across the country in 1989, published by Accolade. It did well critically, and was feverishly received by budding gearheads everywhere. Two goliaths, right from the pages of your Dad’s car magazines, and you could drive them yourself.

Today, Test Drive II is something called abandonware, meaning that so much time has passed since its release it is no longer supported. It’s an orphan, and while still under general copyright, is free to play if you load an emulator on to your computer to slow it down to the speed they ran at in 1989.

For me, to do so is an instant time-warp back to the Ladysmith basement of my friend Darcy Kulai, more than two decades ago. The fuzzy synthesized bass hums through the headphones as the Accolade logo flashes on screen, and then a red F40 appears, its window sliding open so that the driver can give you the thumbs-up, then exit stage left, pursued by the silver 959.

Scrolling through the detailed spec-sheets, I choose the 959, just like I always did when I was a kid, and pick a computerized F40 as my opponent. Selecting somewhere in the middle of the ridiculous twelve different difficulty settings, the loading screen goes blank briefly, and then we’re out on the road, with an electronic humming meant to represent the idling flat-six engine.

The timer counts down, I press forward and the artificial squeal of tires comes through the speakers. The Porsche gets the holeshot, just like it always did twenty-five years ago, and then it’s through the first digitized corner, the pixel at the top of the steering wheel twitching to the right, then the left.

It looks completely outdated, blocky, and slow, and jerky. Nevertheless, it’s magic.

Everybody on the small team behind Test Drive had a different favourite. “I preferred the elegance of the 959,” Dawson states, while Kiss says, “I always liked the F40.” Gour muses over the problem. “My father being associated with Porsche, I had a natural favourite. Today I think I’d go for the rawness of the F40 as it still looks great and the 959 has been exceeded in every way by modern 911s.”

In many ways, that’s The Duel’s story too – outclassed by any modern racing game, it’s nonetheless interesting as a pioneering front-runner, and for nostalgia’s sake too. It blazed the way for the Need For Speed series, a very popular title for EA, and heralded the rise of racing games that tried to be more than just icons moving around the screen.

Today, Don Mattrick chairs Zynga, a maker of casual games, and reportedly has a collection of cars that’d make an oil baron jealous. Kris Hatelid is a security architect at Microsoft, Bruce Dawson works for Valve, and both Erik Kiss and Brad Gour now do consultancy in the gaming industry. Amory Wong teaches a new generation the math and computer science they need to enter the industry, should they choose to do so. He also has a 959 of his own – a Honda CBR959RR.

Both the Ferrari and the Porsche are extremely rare cars, restricted in importation and limited in numbers. The future belongs to a new race of supercars: outrageously-powerful hybrids perhaps more in the image of the hyper-competent 959 than the no-holds-barred F40.

However, there was a time when these two ruled the earth, clashing together like Godzilla and Mothra. Test Drive II was never a duel to the death. Instead, it ensured an electronic way to make sure the F40 and the 959 would be forever immortalized in pixels, bytes, and at least one young man’s imagination.

Anatomy of a Duel

A direct descendant of the 288GTO, the F40 was one of the most raw and unruly supercars the world would ever see.
Ferrari, Driving

Ferrari F40

Engine:
2.9L twin-turbocharged V8
478hp @ 7000rpm
425lb/ft @ 4000rpm

Transmission:
5-speed manual gearbox

Chassis:
Steel frame, carbon-kevlar composite body
Mid-engine, rear-wheel-drive
Weight – 1100kg

Performance:
0-100km in 3.8 seconds
Top Speed ~324km

Designed to celebrate Ferrari’s 40th anniversary, the F40 was the last machine to be personally approved by Enzo himself. Direct descendant of the 288GTO, it was one of the most raw and unruly supercars the world would ever see – in an age of traction control and clever differentials, it’s also not the sort of car we’re likely to see again.

Power came from a 2.9L V8 with twin IHI turbochargers, bringing power to a stout 478hp. For the time, this was rocket-propelled stuff, and with a curb weight of just 1100kgs, it’s still impressive today. Moreover, power varies on most dyno-tested F40s, leading some to believe that it was actually making slightly closer to 500hp.

Whatever the case, it was fast and it was brutal. The weight was kept down by a body composed of carbon-fibre and kevlar, stretched out over a spine of steel. There was no air-conditioning, no stereo, no carpeting, and not much of a trunk. Peer through the slotted rear lexan window and you could see the twin intercoolers that formed the lungs of the beast.

The F40 did not and does not suffer fools gladly. It is extremely twitchy to drive, and the throttle must be managed carefully to avoid certain doom. However, with a skilled driver at the helm, it is incredibly fast, with a slightly modified version having cracked the 360km/h mark at Bonneville.

In total, 1,315 F40s were built between 1987 and 1992. Not all survive, thanks to their fearsome dynamics.

As a road-going car, the 959 had all manner of technologies we now take for granted, from adjustable-height suspension to all-wheel-drive.
Porsche, Driving

Porsche 959

Engine:
2.9L twin-turbocharged H-6
450hp @ 7000rpm
369lb/ft @ 4000rpm

Transmission:
6-speed manual gearbox

Chassis:
Aluminium, composite unibody
Rear-engine, all-wheel-drive
Weight – 1450kg

Performance:
0-100km in 4.1 seconds
Top Speed ~314km

If the 959 is a few tenths off the officially reported numbers of the F40, that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily slower. Thanks to an upright driving position, sequentially-turbocharged engine, and torque-distributing PSK all-wheel-drive, the 959 could be driven at the limit far more safely and effectively than the Ferrari. Essentially, you needed to be skilled to pilot the Porsche, where you needed a centipede’s-worth of rabbit’s feet not to die in the F40.

Built to compete in the doomed Group B series, just as the F40’s parent 288GTO was, the 959 was also conceived of as a glimpse of what the future might hold for the 911. Indeed, from certain angles, the car looks much like the 993 generation of cars, the last of the air-cooled 911s. Turbocharged versions of those would likewise have all-wheel-drive, but be fitted with turbochargers in parallel rather than sequentially.

In 1986, racing versions of the 959 were campaigned both at the gruelling 24 hours of LeMans, and in the Paris-Dakar rally. In the latter, they finished first and second, their iconic Rothman’s livery becoming an instant part of the Porsche story. The LeMans outing was no less successful, finishing first in class and second overall.

As a road-going car, the 959 had all manner of technologies we now take for granted, from adjustable-height suspension to that clever all-wheel-drive. The wheels had hollow-spokes to save weight, yet just like a normal 911, it was comfortable and easy to drive. The difference between it and the F40 is that between a loyal hunting dog and an ill-tempered tiger on a slightly too-short leash. The argument could be made that you really need both.

source: http://driving.ca/ferrari/auto-news/news/the-duel-ferrari-f40-vs-porsche-959

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