Full Burn

It is said that our brains hold about seven parcels of information in working memory.  Once the limit has been reached, something must be pushed out to make room for the new information.  Sometimes outgoing parcels are far more important than incoming ones, but retrieving lost packages in the brain is almost as tough as retrieving them from your favorite shipping company.

What if I told you AcMo could increase brain parcel storage capacity from seven to 7000?  Would that be something that might interest you?  Our proprietary RAM upgrade and minor invasive surgery can transform you into a memory superstar.  The upgrade enables full user control so you can organize and catalog memories in any fashion you like and not have to worry about retrieval difficulties.  While AcMo Medical awaits the impending FDA approval for this procedure, I'll let that marinate in your brains for a bit.  I will at times push this thought so that it occupies all seven slots in your working memory so you will never lose it until you opt for the upgrade.

My days are filled with questions that I don’t believe are unique to my thought process.  I am often asking myself the most efficient, logical, and economical way to handle a given task or assignment.  The work involved in finding solutions is tiring, but it has to be done.  When my mind is off-leash and wandering like my neighbor’s cat who always end up in my yard, I start to wonder about the underlying premise: the purpose of our existence.  Why are we here?  I hope part of our purpose isn't to destroy the planet we inhabit.  Logic can be a blessing and a detriment.  Being too logical can lead to uninspiring and wasted endeavors.  However, abandoning logic all together can lead to extreme misfortune.

Motor racing may be an activity that exists somewhere between those two points in the logic scale.  It makes sense in a hard-coded genetic level to some people, and it can accelerate the advancement of new technologies whose benefits can reach far beyond the world of racing, but sometimes the thinking needs to go away and you just need to do something because you can and you want to do it.

That internal struggle to find the “best” method to accomplish a task I mentioned earlier rarely leads to extraordinary breakthroughs or exhilarating moments.  The mundane parts of life only serve to make the special parts even more special, but the mundane parts are not fun.  It is rare to find a group of individuals so united in their cause that they will abandon all logic to succeed, but it happens.  We try to surround ourselves with that type of person at AcMo.  That’s how we are able to pivot our business plan so well.

The current world of high-level professional racing includes several series that run based on a fuel economy limit.  I often wonder if it is foolish to try to make racing appear green.  At that point, you could be completely environmentally friendly by not racing at all.  I know that’s blasphemy, but if you can’t go flat out while racing, what’s the point?

I’m reminded of Prodrive’s assault on Le Mans with the Ferrari 550 GTS Maranello in the early 2000’s.  I forgot that the car couldn’t be referred to as a Ferrari because Ferrari wouldn’t allow that.  This was a ludicrous rogue effort by Prodrive and a wealthy client who thought it would be neat to turn a soft road car that was never intended to race into a champion.  The factory believed there was no chance of success, and I don’t think they could take the potential embarrassment from watching its car get humiliated on track.  That might cause people to start asking what makes the cars so great and expensive in the first place, and maybe start buying from rival manufacturers instead.  Ferrari would not provide any factory support for parts, technical information, or personnel.  It turns out Prodrive was better off without any of those things.

Prodrive had the right mentality to get the job done and had faith in themselves and must have seen potential in the car.  I don’t know if they really believed the car could win, but it doesn’t matter now.  This was a time when you didn't save anything for the next race, and there weren’t any limits on the amount of fuel you could burn per hour.  Everything was poured into winning the race. The next race didn't matter until it was time for the next race.

There were plenty of vociferous doubters of the potential of the red car of Prodrive.  That started to change when the true pace of the car was revealed.  This not suitable for circuit racing, highly modified 550 GTS Maranello was fast!  Pole position in class was the warning shot.  There was actually some fight in this soft car after all.  This was going to be a contest for top honors.  Except it wasn’t.

The legend is that an engine problem was discovered early in the race.  Repairs were either not possible or would have taken too long to keep the car in contention for victory.  The team could slow their pace and hope that luck allowed them to finish well, withdraw the car, or (my favorite option) run the car as hard as possible to show their true form.  Once the car was unleashed, its top speed rivaled the prototypes of the time, it was breathtaking to watch this non-Ferrari Ferrari scorch the track.  Maybe they would defy the odds and hold together because neither the Corvettes or Vipers were ever going to catch it, but most likely they would flame out in spectacular fashion.  Since racing isn’t supposed to be about conservation of resources, they drove flat out until the car remembered its Ferrari roots and caught on fire in the 13^th hour.  Go big or go home indeed.

This would have been one of the greatest tales of victory at Le Mans had the car survived, but it was not to be.  Not that year anyway.  2003 was a different story altogether.  Prodrive was able to secure class victory in 2003 by 10 laps over the Corvette.  Not bad for a car lacking any factory support and competing against the combined motorsport arsenals of GM and Dodge.  After it was proven to be a race winner, Ferrari tried to get into the game with the factory built 575 GTCs.  The factory didn’t have as much success as Prodrive.  I wonder why.

I’ve heard lots of stories about these cars, but I don’t know where the truth resides.  I’ve heard that the chassis was derived from remnants of a terminated Lotus GT1 effort.  I’ve never been able to uncover concrete evidence to confirm or refute this.  At this point it doesn’t matter since it makes for a great story either way.

We hope to follow in the footsteps of the legendary efforts of Prodrive at Le Mans with our F-One entry.  Heck, we may even try to get an invite to Le Mans to see how our car does against the prototypes.  Wherever we race, we pledge to run the Scuderia AcMo F-One cars as hard as we can without regard to fuel limits or tire restrictions.  We will use every last bit of performance until we win or the cars burn to the ground.  There will not be any tire saving slow laps or fuel conservation strategies.  Expect to see a lot of failures, but we can promise the racing action will be spectacular while it lasts.  This is no different than how we treat our client’s road cars.  We will win races or blow up trying.  There is no other way.  It would be great to see a new GT competitor show up at Le Mans and decimate the field.  I hear Ford may be joining the party in 2016…