It's more than often when we hear that some things were better back in the day, with men being more manly, and other stuff you most likely heard so many times. While such facts were arguably better then, here's one thing that will leave you speechless, and which will prove that certain "old-school" aspects are hard to match now.
The building in these photos is the old Fiat factory in Turin, northern Italy. The block had five floors and was quite large; after all, we are talking about a car factory. However, there is one detail that sets this building apart from pretty much everything else: it has a race track on the roof.
In case you thought that the tennis field on top of the Burj Al-Arab hotel was something never seen before, we hate to disappoint you, but Fiat's top-floor testing circuit beats everything else.
The Lingotto factory was the birthplace of around 80 car models during the time it was operational, and it looks like each was tested on this scary circuit.
Now, the turns are banked, allowing the drivers to travel at a high speed without fear of understeering and flying off the roof to certain death. Even so, making a mistake at high speed could cause a rider or driver to take a most unfortunate line and crash outside the track.
Honestly, we don't even know what's worse, to fly off to the outside, or fall into the pit. Some buddies who saw these photos are already talking that wearing a parachute could be an interesting idea, at least provided that a pilot exits the track at a speed high enough to help the extraction parachute deploy the canopy.
This type of humor is truly dark, and we'd rather stick with the balls of steel those guys had. Anyway, below you have a scene from the original Italian Job, to show you how those good old days were. Too bad the track is now closed, Guy Martin looks like a fellow that would have loved to ride there.
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