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Schumacher on the Ferrari 458 Italia - great car, crap video
So the Ferrari drip-feed on the gorgeous new 458 Italia continues in the run-up to Frankfurt, this time with a video hosted by some German guy in a camp T-shirt and even camper necklace.
What’s that you say? He’s former F1 world champion Michael Schumacher? Really? He needs to spend some of his millions on a stylist. Badly.
So after wading through more layers of cheese than a lasagne, the one bright spot in the video is that we get to see the 458 in action. It looks great belting around the Maranello test track and is almost enough to make us overlook the promotional film’s many shortcomings.
Because the script is dreadful. Schuey speaks pretty good English, but here it seems he’s been forced to read random car-related words from an autocue, written by an Italian whose understanding of our tongue is a little on the sketchy side.
Now, as a rule, I don’t like to criticise non-English speakers who attempt to use the language: it’s not easy to learn and, beyond my A-Level French, I’m hardly a cunning linguist myself, so who am I talk? But you’d think that Ferrari– a company that pays a lot of attention to detail in all the cars it builds, whether for road or track– would have been sufficiently switched-on to get a native speaker to script and help Schuey with its delivery.
And it’s a shame, because Schumacher was involved with the development of the car, so he could have given us some interesting insights on its development. Instead we get nonsensical platitudes about how the steering“has increased precision and accuracy by tremendous amount” (sic), how the“driving activity is very comfortable” and the braking system“has such a performance I have never seen before”.
Oh well, I don’t suppose anyone will really care. The car’s the star of this minute-and-a-half-long video and I’m sure the quality control of the finished car will be better than this shoddy piece of marketing.
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