DRIVING,
INTIMATELY
Why the fastest car is not always
the one that makes you feel the most.
By Dante Guarnaccia
Contributor, THE SHIFT
Before Speed
My passion for driving goes back a long way.
I can still remember my father letting me ‘drive’ his Lancia Fulvia Coupé in the courtyard of my grandparents’ house.
It was finished in Lancia blue, with biscuit-coloured leather inside.
He would sit me on his lap behind the wheel, and I would move the steering wheel from side to side.
To me, that was already driving. It was a dream. I must have been four years old.
Later came motorcycles.
First, the cinquantino: a Malaguti F10 scooter, which we immediately modified.
After getting my motorcycle licence, I moved on to my father’s 350cc Aermacchi Harley-Davidson, where I began getting familiar with a manual gearbox.
Then things became more serious.
An Aprilia RS 125 in the black Max Biaggi Chesterfield livery.
A Yamaha FZR 1000 EXUP. An R6.
Other increasingly powerful motorcycles.
No electronic safety nets. Analog. Pure.
At the same time, I started driving cars. At eighteen I got my licence and began with a Volkswagen Polo 16V.
I remember thinking it was incredibly fast. It had, if I remember correctly, around 100 horsepower, but weighed roughly 1,000 kilograms.
More importantly, apart from electronic injection and ABS, it was still almost entirely analog.
And this is where the real story begins.
The 350cc Aermacchi Harley-Davidson that belonged to my father.
The motorcycle on which I first learned to use a manual gearbox, and an important step in a lifelong passion for driving.
When Numbers Stop Mattering
Talking about driving and all its nuances is always fascinating, especially after accumulating experiences at circuits such as Monza, Imola, Cremona and Balocco, behind the wheel of cars from very different eras.
One thing has become increasingly clear to me:
The intensity of a driving experience is not necessarily proportional to power.
That idea feels more relevant today than ever, at a time when electric cars can easily produce more than 1,000 horsepower.
Driving isn’t simply about managing power.
It is about connection.
With the car. With the road. With yourself.
In modern cars, particularly today’s enormously powerful electric and combustion-engined supercars, technology has become a silent intermediary.
Electronic controls. Power steering. Adaptive suspension. Driver assistance systems.
The result can sometimes be an experience that feels sterilised.
Extraordinarily fast, certainly. But filtered.
There is often something that doesn’t quite convince you.
The Modern Weapons
In 2021, I had the opportunity to drive the then pre-production Alfa Romeo Giulia GTA and GTAm at Balocco.
Compared with the already emotional Giulia Quadrifoglio, they represented a significant step forward, probably helped by Alfa Romeo’s collaboration with Sauber.
What immediately stood out was the front end. Precise. Granite-like.
It felt almost as though the front tyres were carving grooves into the asphalt of that beautiful proving ground that once belonged to Alfa Romeo.
Power and weight had been improved further. The GTA and GTAm are perhaps among the most emotional modern cars I have driven.
And yet, even there, you can still sense that something exists between you and the experience.
Then there is the Dallara Stradale, which I drove at Imola.
It is so effective that it can almost intimidate you, not because of its power, which is considerable, but because of its extremely low weight and highly developed aerodynamics.
At high speed, you physically feel the aero beginning to work. It becomes such a dominant part of the experience that it almost overshadows the other exceptional elements: the brakes, chassis and gearbox.
Perhaps only the engine doesn’t quite reach the same level.
It is effective and revs beautifully, but its sound and linear delivery make it feel slightly impersonal.
The aerodynamics also make the Stradale feel closer to an endurance racing car than a conventional road-going sports car.
It moves away from the gentleman driver and closer to the racing driver.
An exceptional machine.
But perhaps more a car for the driver-as-pilot than the driver-as-enthusiast.
Alfa Giulia Sprint GTA
Fast is Not the Same as Alive
I also drove the BMW M4 Competition at Imola.
Again, enormously effective.
But there are countless electronic controls and configurations. You feel the weight. You feel the relatively long wheelbase.
It is far removed from what the M3 represented from the E30 through to the E46, cars that offered a more analog and less digital experience.
The M4 is beautiful. Fast. It sounds good, although somewhat muted. The speeds are enormous.
But the smiles behind the wheel are not proportional to the performance.
And then we arrive at the Ferrari 296 GTB that I drove it at Cremona Circuit.
Here, gentlemen, we enter another world.
830 combined horsepower. A hybrid system built around a three-litre, 120-degree V6.
Everything is there to deliver enormous emotion.
And it does.
The engine pulls towards 8,500 rpm and the performance is astonishing. I remember seeing 286 km/h at the end of Cremona’s straight.
The braking power is immense, although its modulation feels slightly digital, perhaps because of the brake-by-wire system.
It is an absurdly capable machine. An ultimate weapon.
But it almost felt too easy.
Not because I had explored its entire potential, assuming I would even be capable of doing so, but because after only three laps it already felt as though I had been driving it forever. That isn’t necessarily a criticism.
On the road, too, it is incredibly easy and incredibly fast.
So what is missing from today’s GTs, supercars and hypercars? In reality, nothing.
They are almost perfect. But their emotions are filtered.
Too Much For the Road
The assistance is always there; power has moved beyond a genuinely human scale, and on public roads, enjoyment becomes restricted simply because the speeds these cars can achieve are increasingly incompatible with the roads themselves.
Weight remains another factor. Electronics can disguise mass, but they cannot make it disappear.
Somewhere in the experience, you feel it.
The Dallara Stradale is an obvious exception, but many modern performance cars, particularly hybrids, carry dozens of kilograms of batteries.
Then there is sound.
So many modern performance cars use six- or eight-cylinder turbocharged engines. Their personalities become increasingly similar, accompanied by those artificial pops and crackles.
The beautiful music of naturally aspirated engines is disappearing.
Think of the twelve-cylinder engine of a Ferrari 250 GTO, designed by Gioachino Colombo.
That is not noise.
It is a symphony. A work of art.
behind the wheel of the BMW M4 Competition at Imola.
Enormously fast and effective, yet a very different experience from the more analog M cars of the past.
A reminder that greater performance does not always translate into greater emotion.
The 250 GTO orchestra
Speed has to be Earned
Drive a historic sports car with ‘only’ 130 horsepower and everything changes.
You enter an analog experience in which everything passes through the driver’s hands and feet.
The heavy clutch. The noisy gearbox. The chassis communicating every imperfection in the road.
And the limit. A limit that you decide whether or not to search for.
Absolute speed matters less than your perception of speed.
In a historic car, speed has to be earned. In a modern car, speed has to be managed.
Perhaps that single difference defines the entire experience.
At circuits like Monza or Balocco, you can explore pure performance and understand how different it feels to connect with a traditional Quadrifoglio compared with a GTA or GTAm.
With every technological development, surprises decrease and control increases.
But sometimes technology also removes part of that genuine pleasure created by unpredictability and instinct.
On the road, the contrast becomes even clearer.
An old Alfa Romeo Spider or a classic GT can deliver more emotion than a modern GT because it involves you in every action.
It can make you smile simply because you took a corner properly at 50 km/h.
Driving Intimately
To me, driving intimately means total interaction.
Understanding limits. Managing mistakes. Developing empathy with the machine.
A historic car forces you to be present.
You listen. You react. You perceive its noises, sounds, smells and even its particular scents.
A modern car can astonish you with its efficiency, but sometimes it risks leaving you as a spectator of its abilities rather than the true protagonist.
You feel slightly transported. Never quite the leading actor in the film.
The Smile
Ultimately, genuine driving pleasure comes from involvement. From being an active part of the experience.
Power alone cannot guarantee emotion.
What matters isn’t how much a car gives you. It is how it gives it to you.
That is where analog driving still wins.
Because it can leave you with smiles that remain long after the numbers have been forgotten and perhaps there is a reason for that.
Smiling is a little like becoming a child again, and that's a synonym of purity.
It means finding your way back to your own soul.
Drive what makes you smile
