Wind in your hair, V8 in your ears, 1036bhp at your feet… Is Ferrari's quickest cabrio also its best?
You have to remark on the timing, if not necessarily read into it too much.Just a few short weeks ago, you might remember, Ferrari pulled the covers off a fairly intriguing new model called the Luce. Electric, it is, and atypically a five-seater - which caused something of a stir among the tifosi. Perhaps not to the same extent as did its wilfully controversial styling – conceived by the man responsible for the iPhone, and obviously so – and the fact that it is, to all intents and purposes, an SUV.The Luce, it is fair to say, is the least 'Ferrari' Ferrari yet created, even allowing for the wheezing V6 Dino and the slushy, GM-gearboxed 400 saloon of the 1970s - as illustrated by a dramatic dip in Maranello’s usually enviable share prices in the wake of its debut. Not to mention the Instagram comments.“This won’t do,†you imagine the red-faced executives agreeing in a hastily convened board meeting a few days later. “Let’s turn this ship around and save some face.â€And so it is that we found ourselves, in the same week that Ferrari urgently appointed a new marketing boss and showed us its first ‘manual’ gearbox in more than a decade (air quotes because it’s still technically an automatic), on a gorgeous, sweeping mountain road in the new Ferrari 849 Testarossa Spider, reacquainting ourselves with Maranello’s core principles, which have plainly not been sidelined in the pursuit of progress towards a bold new electric future.“Don’t forgetâ€, you can almost hear them saying, “we still make the world’s greatest supercars.â€This is the wig-wrecking convertible version of the successor to the SF90 Stradale and thus the proclaimed flagship of Ferrari’s sports car line-up - the £3 million F80 standing on its own as a vastly more exclusive and limited-run hypercar.It uses the same fundamental V8 plug-in hybrid powertrain as its predecessor, with a pair of motors on the front axle and one between the engine and gearbox, but with power ramped up past the 1000bhp mark to make this the second most powerful road car Ferrari has yet produced.The boundary between supercars and hypercars grows blurrier by the day, making the 849 slightly tricky to pigeonhole, but for reference those figures are in line with the similarly conceived Aston Martin Valhalla and Lamborghini Revuelto. Either way, with a scarcely believable 0-62mph time of 2.25sec, it is comfortably one of the quickest series-production convertibles of all time; and with prices starting at more than £440,000, it is one of the most expensive too.Â
