Ferrari changes its tune

ONCE, the most trusted brands in the world were those associated with soft-drinks, fast-food, detergents, motor cars and petroleum. That has all changed. Of the ten most valuable brands today, all bar one is a tech company of one sort or another. Apple rules with an estimated brand value of $105 billion, according to Brand Finance’s 2014 Global 500 index. Samsung follows with a $79 billion brand value. Then come Google, Microsoft, Verizon, General Electric, AT&T, Amazon, Wal-Mart (the exception) and IBM. Once dominant Coca-Cola now ranks twelfth. Even before its emissions-cheating shenanigans, Volkswagen was a modest nineteenth.

So what to make of the market valuation awarded supercar-maker Ferrari, of Maranello, Italy, following its recent initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange? As a small auto firm, Ferrari ought to trade on the stock-market with a price/earnings (p/e) ratio of around the sector’s average of 13 or so. However, opening as it did at $52 a share, the appetite for the company’s stock implied a p/e three times greater. That is the upper end of the luxury-goods market.

That is precisely how Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (Ferrari’s parent) packaged the offering in its filing—ie, a symbol of luxury, exclusivity, innovation, state-of-the-art performance, and Italian design and engineering flare. All true. Yet, Ferrari’s modest $4 billion brand value puts it a lowly 350th on Brand Finance’s index. Something else—apart from stratospheric prices, sensuous styling, restricted production (capped at little over 7,000 cars a year) and months-long waiting lists—has contributed significantly to Ferarri's mystique.

For petrol-heads in general, and tifosi in particular, the Ferrari allure is as much aural as visual. Even before they come into view, Maranello cars trumpet their presence with a fanfare all of their own. Though wholly different, their bright tenor song defines the Ferrari brand as much as the thunderous baritone rumblings proclaim a Harley-Davidson motorbike. Others have tried to imitate both sounds. Indeed, to thwart Japanese upstarts, Harley-Davidson once sought to register the charismatic “potato-potato-potato” soundtrack of its big vee-twins.

While the aural aspects of a brand image cannot be patented, they can definitely be trademarked. The roar of the familiar lion prefacing MGM films, for instance, is an integral part of the studio’s intellectual property. As far as is known, Ferrari has never tried to register the sound of its engines. Perhaps that is because it knows, from long experience, how much effort and expense others would have to expend to get their engines to sing from the same song sheet.

Having flatplane crankshafts in its engines helps no end. Such power units spin up faster and rev to much higher speeds than conventional vee-eights with crossplane cranks. In so doing, they bark with a banshee shriek rather than a throaty rumble. Away from the race track, only a handful of carmakers go to the trouble of building vee-eights with flatplane crankshafts. Lotus used to do so. So did TVR, another small British sportscar firm, which has since gone out of business. Ferrari remains one of the few to persist. A newcomer, surprisingly, is Ford.

The replacement for Ford’s testosterone-laden Shelby GT500 Mustang has a flatplane crankshaft as part of a wholesale upgrade of its aging platform. But while the new Shelby GT350 Mustang can rev to 8,250 RPM, its vee-eight produces nothing like the wail of a Ferrari. Ford deliberately packaged the intake and exhaust manifolds differently and adopted an alternative piston arrangement. The result is the broader, more manageable spread of power that muscle-car customers prefer.

As the name implies, a flatplane crankshaft has all its crankpins (where the reciprocating motion of the pistons is converted into rotational motion of the crankshaft) spaced 180° apart—ie, all in the same plane. By contrast, a crossplane crankshaft in a typical vee-eight engine has its crankpins set 90° apart from one another. Viewed end on, a flatplane crankshaft resembles the letter “I”, while its crossplane cousin looks more like the letter “X”.

There is nothing new about flatplane cranks. They were the preferred type back in the early days of motoring. Their simple layout made them easy to manufacture, and they were more than adequate for the needs at the time. In the pursuit of a smoother ride, however, Cadillac introduced the first crossplane vee-eight in 1923.

Essentially, a flatplane vee-eight is two inline four-cylinder engines sharing a common crankshaft. As such, it inherits all the foibles of the latter. While the first and fourth pistons in a four-cylinder engine move in the opposite direction to the second and third, the pairs do not balance one another out dynamically. Because they have to accelerate faster in the upper half of the cylinder than in the lower, there is always an out-of-balance inertial force that tends to rock the engine from side to side.

This “secondary vibration” in a flatplane vee-eight is significantly greater than that of any engine which reciprocates its pistons more evenly—ie, in 90° (rather than 180°) intervals—such as a crossplane vee-eight. While modest when idling, this secondary shaking increases exponentially with engine speed.

So why bother with flatplane cranks anyway? For two reasons. First, they do not need heavy counterweights to balance the static weight of their pistons, connecting rods and crankpins. Being all in one plane, opposing pairs of pistons balance each other instead. With a lower rotational mass, the engine can then spin faster, which translates into greater power and a more immediate response to the throttle—an essential feature of sportscars.

The second attraction is the flatplane vee-eight’s firing order, alternating evenly between the two banks of cylinders (L-R-L-R-L-R-L-R ). This provides not only better airflow into the engine, but also evenly spaced pulses of exhaust gas from each bank of cylinders—and hence better “scavenging” of the waste gases from the engine. Better breathing provides yet more power and improved efficiency. The even firing order also permits the exhaust manifold to be far simpler in design. A flatplane vee-eight needs none of the long, equal-length crossover pipes (“bundle of snakes”) that crossplane engines—because of their uneven firing order (usually L-R-L-L-R-L-R-R)—are forced to adopt for scavenging reasons.

Overall, a flatplane vee-eight is a smaller, lighter engine with a lower centre of gravity than its crossplane equivalent—all features prized by sportscar-makers. Being free to spin up quickly, to far higher RPM, it offers greater top speed. Its one drawback—its secondary vibration—is of little consequence on the race track or in a Ferrari-owner’s garage.

Actually, this is not as bad as it may seem. Specialist sportscar-makers like Ferrari use pricey lightweight materials for their engine components that are beyond the means of ordinary carmakers. Less mass implies lower inertial forces, and hence less vibration than might otherwise be the case. Ferrari also builds its engines massively “over-square”—ie, with a cylinder bore much greater than the piston stroke—to minimise the secondary rocking motion and enhance the free-revving nature of the engine still further.

How does all this translate into something acoustically unique? Certainly, engine speed contributes mightily to the sound of any power unit—and Ferrari engines are no exception. The faster the crankshaft rotates, the higher the volume and frequency of sound generated—as more and more noisy power strokes are crammed into every second. And because a flatplane vee-eight is a relatively light engine, there is less material to dampen the noise. Above all, however, the even firing order of a flatplane vee-eight causes the pulses of air/fuel mixture into the engine and the pulses of exhaust gas out to be in sync. That makes for a particularly smooth engine sound—with both sets of pulses contributing their own special harmonics to the chorus.

On the exhaust side, the “headers” (the downpipes that carry the waste gas away from individual cylinders to a common exhaust pipe connected to catalytic converter and silencer) are tuned, like organ pipes, to prevent back-pressure building up and hindering the gas flow from the engine. When their length is tuned correctly, each of these header pipes creates a standing pressure wave that blends seamlessly into a sonorous hum.

On the inlet side, things are a little more complicated. After the mixture has been sucked into a cylinder and the inlet valve closes, air rushing through the “velocity stacks” (trumpet-like pipes that funnel and smooth the flow) slams into the closed inlet valve, causing pressure to build up and a pressure wave to bounce back upstream towards the velocity stack, where it meets a wall of air at atmospheric pressure. Air in the intake system then begins to resonate as pressure waves are batted back and forth. Fortuitously, the throttle’s butterfly valves in the intake pipes tend to filter out the resonance’s discordant (even) harmonics, leaving the more musically attractive (odd) ones to reach the ear. Ferrari has long been a maestro at orchestrating these inlet and outlet notes and blending them harmoniously with the yowl of a flatplane crankshaft.

But, alas, for how much longer? Earlier this year, the Maranello carmaker unveiled the replacement for its high-revving and freely breathing standard-bearer, the Ferrari 458 Italia. The new Ferrari 488 GTB has a smaller vee-eight engine fitted with (Orrore degli orrori!) a pair of whining turbos. The tifosi have been aghast. “It was akin to turning the late Luciano Pavarotti from a tenor into a soprano,” wrote the editor of one motoring magazine, bemoaning the final curtain for the beloved Ferrari aria.

There is now talk of fitting a turbo-charged vee-six engine to one of Ferrari’s future models. It has not escaped the media’s attention that ever since the FIA, motor sport’s governing body, decreed turbo-charged vee-six engines for Formula 1, the sport has been losing fans left, right and centre. Germany, home of the most successful Formula 1 team of recent years, can no longer muster enough interest to host a grand prix. What has put spectators off particularly is the mushy sound of the F1 engines, which no longer scream evocatively around the circuit like they used to do. Many still hope the magicians of Maranello have a trick or two up their sleeves.