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The Ferrari Enzo's designer isn't worried about the future of supercars

Ken Okuyama is a talented designer with a prestigious portfolio. He spent 12 years at the famed Italian design house Pininfarina after a stint with GM's Advanced Design Studio, where he worked on the C5 Corvette. He also styled the Boxster and 996-generation 911 at Porsche. His first Ferrari design was the Rossa concept car, though his most famous creation is the Enzo. Now Okuyama runs a design studio that not only is responsible for the new Kode57 supercar that debuted in Monterey this past weekend, but also eye glasses, civic planning, and even Japanese bullet trains. We caught up with Okuyama at the Concorso Italiano car show, plopped down on a couple of plush leather chairs right in front of his brand new Kode57, and chatted about what the future holds for car design. Alex Kierstein: Lately there's been a lot of talk about autonomy and future mobility. What sort of challenges and opportunities do you think this autonomous future is going to provide for you as a car designer? Ken Okuyama: It is a really fantastic time for designers because of two reasons. One is that the public and private transport have been two separate, completely different industries up until now. Now, when you think about the future of autonomy, that really brings the automobiles into something more of a public transportation. You really have to think about the total experience of the customers from buying the ticket to the paying mechanism. That's just hardware, actually. It is a huge challenge for engineers and designers, and I really love that. That's one reason. Another reason is that just like horses were a means of transport 100 or so years ago, up until Henry Ford mass-produced the Model T. Now, maybe sports cars are becoming like horses. Now, horses are a great object for hobby, sports, and part of the Olympics and everything. Cars are going to be like that also. Dr. Porsche [was asked what type of] automobile is going to last for the longest time. He said, "the sports car." I really believe in that, because with sports cars, you never lose a sense of ownership. Autonomous vehicles are things you don't have to own. You have to design a total experience and the whole operation. A car, you want to own it. It's part of you. Your mechanical watches, do you borrow them from somebody? You want to own it. Your suits, your favorite shirts, you want to borrow them from somebody for your experience? No, you want to own it. Ownership is a core part of human beings.

Ferrari 488 Pista Prototype Drive | Pants-soiling straight-line performance

Independent studies confirm that Lotus Elise drivers are 221.6 times more likely to spontaneously dispose of light-colored undergarments after driving on curvy roads. That's because the weight distribution of a mid-engine car encourages novice drivers to inadvertently ask the rear wheels to pass the fronts in the middle of a corner. Adding insult to staining, the layout's resulting low polar moment of inertia ensures that this rotation happens more quickly than the average person's sphincter-startle clench reflex. The flip side is that even the most powerful mid-engine cars have enough weight over their rear wheels to make straight-line acceleration a worry-free affair. Well, they used to. Full-throttle acceleration in the Ferrari 488 Pista is genuinely terrifying. Wheelspin is a genuine threat at any road-legal speed — and when that happens, its rear end steps out with the same violence as the car accelerates. And that is saying something. The 488 Pista is diabolically quick. Like, hallelujah-hold-on-tight, praise-the-lord, scream-like-a-child and slap-yo-momma quick. Or, in slightly more objective terms, the Ferrari's claimed 7.6-second sprint from a standstill to 200 km/h (124 mph) is but 0.3 second behind that of the 1,000-hp Bugatti Veyron 16.4. When we say quick, we mean QUICK. Perhaps too quick for the road, so it's a good thing the car is literally named after the track. The Pista is the latest in the lineage of harder-core Ferraris that began with the 360 Challenge Stradale. The 360CS, like the F430 Scuderia ("Team") and 458 Speciale ("Special") that followed, was a little quicker than the regular car, a little more devoid of creature comforts and a lot louder. The same basic recipe applies to the 488, though in its transition from GTB to Pista (say "peas-ta"), its engine gets a bigger power boost than any of its predecessors. Boasting 720 metric horsepower, or 710 American ponies, the Pista makes 49 hp more than the already absurdly powerful 488 GTB. The expected weight-savings measures are also present, accounting for a claimed 198-pound reduction in total mass. Ten-percent-stiffer springs and recalibrated magnetorheological dampers offer tighter body control, and Michelin Sport Cup 2 tires conspire with those changes to generate massive cornering grip. But more on that later — the star of this prototype preview drive was the engine, Ferrari's award-winning 3.9-liter flat-plane-crankshaft V8.

Race recap: 2015 Singapore Grand Prix full of odd sideshows

What greeted the Formula One teams in Singapore? Confusion. The haze was so thick that observers wondered if the race would be held at all. Then practices began, and Mercedes-AMG Petronas driver Nico Rosberg took the first one, but the team fell away after that. Mercedes said it couldn't get the tires turned on, but no one believed the Silver Arrows was in genuine trouble. Then qualifying set the confusion in stone. Ferrari driver Sebastian Vettel laid down the best time in Q3, taking the team's first pole position since Germany in 2012. Daniel Ricciardo got his Infiniti Red Bull Racing into second, about one tenth behind Vettel. (That may make the team feel better after Ricciardo publicly asked for a better engine than the current Renault unit, and team advisor Helmut Marko said the outfit will quit F1 at the end of this year if it can't get a stronger powerplant for 2016.) Kimi Raikkonen put the second Ferrari in third, Daniil Kvyat put the second Red Bull in fourth. And only then came the Meredes'. Lewis Hamilton's best got him fifth, the Brit saying, "We don't really know what we have got wrong. For some reason the tires are not working on the car. We do the warm-up the same as everyone else and then you see someone one second up the road." For added emphasis on the reversal of fortune, his time was 1.6 seconds behind Vettel's. Teammate Rosberg is next to him in sixth, a further half a second back. Williams is still a hurting a bit on slow tracks, so Valtteri Bottas could only get into seventh ahead of Max Verstappen in the Toro Rosso and teammate Felipe Massa in ninth. When the red lights went out, the 2015 Singapore Grand Prix would get both less interesting and more interesting all the way to the final lap. The men up front got good getaways, and the order into Turn 1 was Vettel, Ricciardo, and Raikkonen. The race finished with those three in that order, never having conceded position. Vettel's Ferrari enjoyed the track so much that he laid a second per lap into Ricciardo for the first five, then relaxed. He'd let the gap come down later in the race a couple of times, but any time he wanted to see what his mirrors looked like without anyone in them he'd take off again. Rosberg took fourth position after holding down sixth for the first stint. It looked like he'd have an even worse day - for a Mercedes driver - when he had problems getting his car started and onto the grid before the race.