Magus Cars India

YOU HAVETO MOVE QUICKLY TO KEEP UP WITH

Ferrari these days. And, holy moly, you have to move very quickly indeed keep up with this new Ferrari, the 458 ltalia. This supercar is the new benchmark in getting from A to B as rapidly possible. Truly. It’s so quick it almost troubles me.

But first let’s talk about Ferrari - the little maker of the cars with the world’s biggest reputation, the operation that even I can recall just a few years back being based in a few knackered sheds off Maranello’s Via del Abetone (and I’m really not that old), but now occupies a campus that looks and feels like it might double for NASA’s European advanced research centre. An operation so devoted to living on the cutting edge of, well, everything, mat even the worker’s lunchtime spaghetti hoops on roast are served up in a canteen designed by Marco Visconti, in a building mar’s clocked numerous architecture awards.

Technology? It’s bigger than Catholicism in this corner of Italy. Once, the Maranello skyline was very deliberately dotted with guilt-inducing spires, domes and bell-towers; now, glowing Ferrari logos are plastered allover me steel auld glass temples of technology that loom out of me seasonal fog wrapping round us on the night we fly in to hear about, and behold, the 458 - quattrocento cinquantotto in the local, but I like its given name best… Italia.

Think of the 458 this way, the 355 - a not unimpressive car - entered production just 15 years ago. Since then we’ve had the 360, its higher-achieving sibling me 430, and that car’s evil twin, me Scuderia. In just 10 years …

But back to the 355, the skinny-hipped reinvention of the bloated 348, me latter possibly the worst car Ferrari ever made, and quite probably the car that made Ferrari wake up to the fact it was resting on its laurels. The 355, built from good old-fashioned steel, had a 3.5-litre V8 engine producing 108bhp/per litre, no traction control, no stability control, its only driver aid ABS, and was the car that would go on to introduce F l-style, steering-wheel actuated semi-automatic (and the phrase ‘flappy paddle’) transmissions. It was launched with a regular five-speed manual transmission, a regular heavy-as-hell Ferrari clutch and an ‘it’ll-be-OK-when-it’s-warmed-up-a-bit’ click-clack gate. A traditional Ferrari then; not really all that good at all, but, hey, we all still loved it. Now here’s the Italia, the most advanced supercar that money can buy - at least until the McLaren MP4whateverit’scalled comes along, and maybe even then, but we’ll leave that for Ferrari and Mclaren to squabble over later.

Flappy-paddle gearchanges have been designed, redesigned, perfected and disposed of within the 15 years that have elapsed between me 355 and this car. Gone. Hisrory. Left to Signori Massa and Alonso and the rest to deal with. This car has a dual- clutch transmission so perfect it spells the beginning of me end of me clutch pedal. Forever. Think on that - an entire avenue of automotive engineering examined, explored, developed, perfected … discarded.

And that’s not tile only technology recently eclipsed or quite possibly reaching the apogee of its development curve on this car. The ltalia is all aluminum. A mix of castings and extrusions (which dominate), strategically placed high-resistance aluminum and aluminum sheeting and, just here and there, a little bit of high-strength steel, for old times’ sake. It makes for a car mat weighs in at 1,380kg, yet comfortably meets all the off-set concrete blocks me world’s, and America’s, safety mandarins will ever throw at it.

Then there are the driver aids. Traction control, stability control, electronically controlled Ferrari ‘E-diff3′ differential and, yes, ABS. Only this is what Ferrari is calling ‘High Performance ABS’ complete with Mercedes-style ‘Pre-Fill’ ::- which gets the carbon-ceramic (natch) brakes ready for action the nano it senses you take your foot off the throttle. It’ll save you a metre-and-a-half should you throw the anchors our at 100kph says Ferrari.

We first saw the switchable driving mode manettino in 2004 on the steering wheel of the 430, and then with the Scud. In the most basic terms this allowed you to set the car’s driver aids to everything from shit-it’s-snowing to l-think-l’m-a- driving-God. The manertino in the 458 has moved on. Where before the system made some difference to the driving experience, with this car’s advanced electronics, FI-TRAC and E-diff3, now it makes all the difference. Previously, when you wanted to pretend to be Michael Schumacher, the car set itself up rock-hard and that was that. In the 458, with the suspension set to ‘Bumpy Road’ (come on, as compliant as this car is, Ferrari was never going to have a setting named ‘Comfort’), you enjoy the quicker shifts, the more aggressive throttle responses, the less nanny-like stability control of the track settings on everyday roads. It’s almost as if Ferrari believes some people will engage these banzai non-programmes on their daily commutes. As if..

Now let’s talk engine. Remember the 355 and its then- impressive 108bhp/litre? Well, how about I 27bhpllitre? With no forced induction of any sort, just space-age stuff like two- stage direct injection which blows fuel into the combustion chamber on both the induction stroke and the compression stroke, and an oil scavenge pump nicked from the FI V8 that deals with an unfortunate issue known as ‘winding’ - nothing to do with your infant’s indigestion, but everything to do with the unfortunate exchange of gases between the two sides of a V8’s oily end which can drain an engine of power the faster it revs. I could go on about the superfinished cams and the diamond-like carbon on the tappets, but you get the picrure …
this engine, engineered like everything at Ferrari by likeable, passionate, smart, young supcr-geeks who have done their time in F I, is state of the art. A work of art.

And there’s more to it than just that extraordinary specific output, which equates to 570bhp at 9,000rpm. It also has 540Nm of torque at 6,000rpm, a commendable 307g/km CO2 and a range of 539Nm between fills based on an ‘official’ average fuel consumption of7.5kpl… Hey,

come on! Do you really expect anything better from something this dose to a spaceship?

So there it is, and here it is, exactly the same size as a 430, yet apparently squatter and lower thanks to the extraordinary body Pininfarina has given it. You won’t be disappointed. It really does look like the Enzo’s little brother from the future. All cab-forwards and complex, dashing, compound curves, the rear fenders flowing off and over to the centre of the rear of the car like Batman’s cape blowing in the breeze. Or Harry Potter’s, as someone less charitable says. Certainly, to listen to the full explanation of every little opening and bump and lip and control surface, you know it’s required some sorcery to make the aero package work in harmony with the styling.

I had been worrying, last night over steak and potatoes, that all this technology would sap the soul of the car, that somehow, however crap, there was something rather honest and sincere about the 355’s lack of sophistication. The Italias neural network pumps shared information around its systems - it’s this integration of the dynamic systems that defines it after a11- but is there still blood, love, heart, passion in there?

Oh God, yes. It’s beautiful … a perfect cocktail of the traditional and the technological, with echoes of the P4 and the original Dino concept car in there as well as the Enzo.

Rows of little LEDs twinkling in the mist tell you this ride is going to be different (and with the fog still sucking the life our of the day, we knew we would be heading for the mountains, where, as recently as last week, it had snowed) but the grumbling, rumbling noise of a V8 warming up in the pre-dawn silence, coughing, finding its cadence, tells you is still very much a warm-blooded Ferrari.

In you climb over the wide sills the aluminium structure demands. The seats, apparently slimmed down to the thinnest veneer of soft, tan leather fit perfectly And really look after your bum, back and shoulders. They’re the first surprise. The second is the way it rides. The Italia has the latest version of Ferrari’s ‘SCM’ magnetorheologiocal dampers. Man, they work. This car is compliant and controlled like no other supercar you have ever driven. Period. This is a whole new game.

So when you bang the dual clutch down into first and nail the throttle, it’s almost a shock that something so refined can act so feral. But feral it is, the power curve traces a straight line from bottom left: to top right… this is the engine that keeps on giving right the way through to the l-can’t-quite-believe-I’m-doing-this- to-a-car red line at 9,000rpm. Hundred mph is less than 3.4sees, 192kph is lO.4sees, v-Max is over 202mph.

And then there’s the way it steers. There are just two complete turns from lock to lock on the Italia, and some hefty lumps of engineering ensuring that effort is translated sincerely and honestly into changes of direction. At Ferrari they have a measure of this component of a car’s dynamic behaviour, where activity at the steering wheel is matched against vehicle response time. The latter being a composite of all the stuff that makes a car change direction quickly and honestly and, believe me, there is an awful lot of stuff - from the design of the bespoke Michelin tyres to the shape and construction of the castings of the suspension components and a lot more in between. Plotted on this measure, the Italia is on the other side of the sheet to the 430, hardly an ingenue when it came to seducing snakey tarmac.

There is little, if anything, to fault on the Italia. I’m still not convinced about carbon-ceramic brakes on the road and I never worked our the logic of the parking brake, but time spent with the Italia is time spent with your mouth open and your brain re-adjusting to its notion of fast.

And yet, there’s something I do worry about. When Ferrari launched the FXX super-Enzo, one of the few legitimate aims of the concept appeared to be an examination of ‘how fast is too fast?’ on the road. That car after all had nearly 800bhp. And yet. .. it’s not just that the Italia is fast (at 1min 25sees around Fiorano it’s really not significantly slower than an Enzo) it’s just
that it’s so fast, so bloody civilised and composed, and so cool about being so fast, it kinda worries me. Seriously, the speeds you could so easily find yourself achieving in this car and the nonchalance with which you might achieve them … Please, don’t just think this car is a little bit better, sharper, faster, it’s so much better, so much sharper, so much faster that it’s easier to re-set the clock than recalibrate it. Don’t think improved, think altogether different to. This is a game-changing car.

And it is all that stuff, all that technology that makes it so amazing. Those dampers, that steering, that insanely complex aero package, that direct-injection V8, that ‘new-dawn’ double clutch transmission.

Buried deep inside the sales brochure for this £180,000 (Rs 1.3 crore) car is a claim that the Italias technical binge will allow owners to drive this car as fast as Michael Schumacher. Now, I don’t want to end on a bum note here, bur I wonder if that’s something truly desirable. I won’t venture an answer, bur maybe you could have a think on it for the New Year.