First Drive Review
arrow
The LaFerrari is definitely *the* Ferrari.
The night I was scheduled to leave for Maranello, Italy, to drive the LaFerrari, Car and Driver hosted a party in New York for the annual auto show. The guests of honor included three racing heroes you’d recognize from the Kodachromes: David Hobbs, Sam Posey, and Brian Redman. These gents hail from the golden age of motorsport, when every race weekend seemed to darken into an orgy of gore and fire.
I apologized in advance to Redman for having to leave the party early. I told him that duty called, and that I was off to drive this $1.35 million road-dart, the latest in a line of rolling-laboratory supercars stretching back through the Enzo, F50, F40, and 288GTO. I also confessed that I was slightly terrified to tangle with the thing. He sized me up and said, “You should be.”
I’ve driven cars that have tried to kill me before, but none with such a vast resume of homicidal know-how. Some have threatened to slide off the road without warning, some have tried to collapse my organs with g-forces, and some have ached to impale me on their sharp interior surfaces. This one does it all. There is a video of Kimi Räikkönen, Ferrari’s F1 driver and a racer of almost Mario Andretti–like versatility, driving the LaFerrari (the TheFerrari?) at the brand’s Fiorano test track. There are flames spitting out of the car’s exhaust pipes. Deafening shrieks. Imminent loss of control at every corner. And then, finally, a lurid, frame-filling spin onto the grass. If Kimi couldn’t corral the surrealist bestiary packed into this car’s short wheelbase, what hope did I, someone who has never even been to Finland, really have?
The LaFerrari uses its stupid name as a feint, belittling a specification that is as serious as an Apollo mission. Its 950-hp hybrid powertrain shames Ferrari’s F14 T F1 car by 200 or so horses (actual F1 power figures are undisclosed). Its center of gravity is 1.4 inches lower than even the Enzo’s, and it uses a carbon-fiber monocoque baked in the same autoclaves as Ferrari’s F1 cars. At speed, its aerodynamics provide the car with one gorilla of downforce (800 pounds). The brakes are cross-drilled and radially vented carbon ceramics discs the size of pizza pans.
There are more powerful cars out there, cars with more downforce, and cars with even bigger and blacker brakes. But the LaFerrari represents a singularity. It is less a conventional supercar than a carefully orchestrated system of technologies resulting in something both brutally animalistic and mechanically pristine.
ARCHITECTURE, POWERTRAIN, AND AERODYNAMICS
We are in Ferrari’s F1 shop, where Franco Cimatti, the head of road-car development, is backdropped by four huge autoclaves, big brewery-vat looking things laid on their side. This is where the LaFerrari’s carbon-fiber tub gets baked, right alongside the racing cars’. Cimatti, thin, with close-cropped hair and wire-rimmed glasses, intones, “If you get the physics right, everything else falls into place. A low center of gravity is key.”
He planned the car’s architecture around its seating position. His original idea was to lay the driver down into an almost F1-like recumbency, legs up and seatback at chaise angle, but found that 32 degrees is as far as you can recline a non-F1-driving human before their front neck muscles compress and their breathing becomes strained. Still, he got the driver 2.4 inches lower than in the Enzo by easing him back and removing the seat, separating the driver’s rear from the tub with just an Alcantara-swathed pad. Without a seat’s springs and compliance, there is no filter to muffle chassis feedback.
Without a seat, though, it would have been kind of awkward and somewhat humiliating to get in and out of the car. So Ferrari cut away the sills and integrated them into the doors, hinging the now large and deep wings off the top of the A-pillar, endurance-car style. The arrowhead-shaped tub has the added effect of reducing frontal area for less drag; open those big doors and the exposed front wheels almost look as if they’re seceding from the body.
The basic slipperiness and lift inherent in the shape led to an active-aero solution to keep the LaFerrari stuck to the road. All its wings and flaps are hidden when the car is parked, but they are one of the most obvious things about it in motion. Front and rear undercar panels are always moving from a low-drag (flat) to high-drag (folded into the slipstream) position as they manage downforce. And a wide fluke at the back is constantly changing pitch and height, rising out from underneath the trailing edge of the engine cover. At 125 mph, downforce ranges from 200 pounds in the low-drag settings to an astounding 800 pounds with all the flaps and wings reaching away from the body, radically upping the car’s stability and adhesion limit.
Part of the aero package is passive, too—there are channels in the shape that help air remain attached to the body, while also funneling flow through the cooling system. And, indeed, the LaFerrari needs all the cooling it can get. Here are the main elements of the so-called HY-KERS (Hybrid Kinetic Energy-Recovery System) powertrain: a 6.3-liter, 789-hp V-12 with variable-length intake runners, a 13.5:1 compression ratio, and 9250-rpm redline to match; an oil-cooled 161-hp electric motor hung off the back of the seven-speed dual-clutch automatic; and a low-set, refrigerated Li-Ion battery pack that acts as a structural element at the rear of the passenger compartment. Total system output is a claimed 950 horsepower, and it’s all orchestrated to highlight each element’s strength. It calls on the electric motor’s instantaneous response to provide a kind of boost, and fill in the screaming V-12’s lower rev range. The result is a compound powertrain with shockingly smooth and direct response; if you’re holding fourth gear and mash the throttle, you’ll swear you were in second.
The car is technically a plug-in hybrid. There is no pure EV setting on the steering-wheel-mounted manettino switch just yet, but later cars will offer drivers the guilt-assuaging luxury of puttering up to 5 miles on battery juice alone.
It will have a limited run of 499 units, so it is not a concept car. But it is highly conceptual: hybrid system for more torque, aero for elevated limits, and a driver sitting on the bottom of the tub for a more direct connection with the machine. It should not surprise you to learn that Cimatti, the car’s mastermind, builds his own titanium road bikes that use the rear of the frame as a springing element.
Continued…