Jan 23
RUF CTR Evo
Images by Gregory Tillman || IG
seen from Brazil
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seen from China
seen from Brazil
seen from Malaysia
seen from Brazil
seen from Brazil
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seen from Türkiye
seen from Kazakhstan
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seen from Kazakhstan
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RUF CTR Evo
Images by Gregory Tillman || IG
The RUF CTR "Yellowbird" fundamentally reshaped the world of high-speed driving. This one-of-one Slantnose from '91, custom-commissioned with RUF's own retractable headlight system for a Japanese collector, is pure, bespoke legend.
RUF CTR Anniversary - Pfaffenhausen, Germany
February, 2023
went to a sim racing facility for the first time!! having never raced or driven in my life, I set a somewhat ok 58.1 in a Fiat Abarth 500 Assetto Corsa around Brands Hatch Indy.
In honor of this, do you have any Fun Fiat Facts?
Whipped out me sim rig to find out how good a time that was, and it must have taken me around ten laps to manage less (a 57.8)! (Gamer excuses for this sessions are a framerate barely at illusion-of-movement levels and some clutch mapping issue that made most shifts crunch.) For someone who never even drove, that's quite good! Now, maybe not "Run get a sim wheel right now for the good of humanity" good... but maybe "Finding out a used Logitech G25 is Christmas-present cheap may enrich your free time" good.
As for the Fun Fiat Fact request, it's denied: not only because I've already written about Fiat -and for my very first post no less- but most importantly because that car is not a Fiat! Indeed, since 2007 Abarth is, officially, a brand unto itself, that sells models like the 500 and the 124, just like Fiat sells models like the 500 and the 124. Now, I don't think anyone is going to try and pretend the similarities are just a coincidence or that an Abarth 500 is in any way not objectively a Fiat - but it's not a "Fiat 500 Abarth" any more than the one below is a "Chevrolet Cavalier Toyota".
That's right, there once was such thing as a Toyota Cavalier. Oh, brand engineering.
This is a rare but not completely isolated arrangement - see for example Ruf, German brand that makes vehicles based on Porsches, best known for the Ruf CTR -nicknamed "Yellowbird"- that bested the Ferrari F40's incredible top speed record.
Be careful who you call ugly under the 200mph barrier.
But yeah, all that is to say, I am not going to give you any fun Fiat facts. >:(
Let's give you fun Abarth facts then! Let's talk about fake exhausts. Big engines move a lot of gas -that's kind of the point- so they have big exhaust pipes for all that gas to leave, and high-tier exhausts are made of fancy materials that shine.
This -and our love for fancy shiny things in general- makes people like big shiny exhausts. But exhausts are very long, and making them big and shiny is costly. So people figured, what if we only make it wide at the end, where you actually see it?
After all, if the tip is large enough, it will satisfy regardless of what the rest of its length is like - sure, people may think it looks a bit weird when you take it out, but that only happens by the time you've already scored, doesn't it. But now, back to exhausts.
If you can just attach a bigger tip to the end of your exhaust, surely you can attach a tip of a different material and have a bog standard exhaust with a cool shiny tip, that now you can also shape to your designer's content!
(Fun fact: an aftermarket exhaust system that only replaces the components that come after the catalytic converter -which, contrary to the popular misconception that confuses it with the muffler, is mounted right beside the engine- is called a "catback exhaust". Picture unrelated.)
But then, if the tip material is completely separate from the exhaust pipe, you can now just make it a plastic part of the bumper and it doesn't need to withstand temperatures as high and is even cheaper and easier to style!
And now that they're not mounted on the tip of the exhaust, they don't have to coincide with it, so you can split the exhaust into two tips, which is cooler because they're more! Hell, you can also do that by just making the exhaust coincide with one tip and have the other blanked off!
But at that point, why even have the exhaust show up back there at all? Just make the tips blank and make the exhaust go down behind them!
And at that point why not just fuck it up to the point where you need this exhaust evolutionary biology 101 course to even recognize it is meant to be an exhaust, if we can kill God who's left to stop us from dancing on his corpse.
Well, the Abarth 500, as you might have guessed by now, has fake exhaust tips. But here's the weird thing: the real exhaust tips are not any less shiny and prominent than the fake ones. See for yourself in this sound video.
Oh also, I hope the devil got some killer stuff from the deal he made with the Abarth exhaust engineer, because if he only got a piddly little soul in exchange for the ability to turn 500 engine noise into this he got majorly screwed over.
Links in blue are posts of mine explaining the words in question - if you liked this post, you might like those!
Twin turbo power fully open 305.21km/h
Ruf CTR
RUF (roof) is a manufacturer known as a 911 specialist since the landing of BTR in 1985. “Aiming to be the fastest road-going car in the world” is Roof’s company motto, and they debut one wonderful machine after another, such as the BR4. Based on the old 911 Carrera, the CTR was equipped with two KKK turbines in a 3.4-liter block and cleared the 300km/h mark at Yatabe (MM magazine).
Twin turbo 3.40 flat 6. Demonstrates 469ps/5950rpm and 57.0kgm/5100rpm even in SOHC
