What is it?
You could drive this new Ferrari for a month and never find an occasion when the road ahead and your backbone combined adequately for you to send the right-foot pedal to the floor.
The SF90 Stradale is many things: the first ever mid-engined Ferrari with four-wheel drive, the first Ferrari with true plug-in hybrid capability and the first road-legal Ferrari to possess a thousand metric horsepower. But above all else, and for the curious souls who do manage to contrive an opportunity to unleash it, the SF90 is satanically quick.
I won’t steal thunder from an upcoming, 4000-word full road test of this novel supercar, but know that when you see the raw numbers, you will find both the car’s lap-time at MIRA and its straight-speed performance quite shocking. In the meantime, this is a brief dispatch following our first taste of the SF90 on British roads.
It’s also a chance to reacquaint ourselves with an exceedingly complex car with a correspondingly high asking price. The SF90 starts at £375,000, despite the fact that neither it nor its Spider sister is limited-production, as was the LaFerrari. Without a composite tub to complicate matters, they’re assembled on the same lines as the F8 Tributo and 812 Superfast.
The example seen here is even more expensive, courtesy of the £40,000 Assetto Fiorano package, which adds track-day flair. It brings fixed-rate dampers from Formula 1 supplier Multimatic and titanium springs; as such there’s no forgiving ‘Bumpy Road’ mode, as you get with the regular multi-mode dampers. Also included is a titanium exhaust, carbon door cards and, in case you somehow missed it, an aggressive rear wing-cum-spoiler, whose central panel can lower to cut off air through-flow by creating an enormous Gurney flap.
But the main event is the plug-in hybrid powertrain. Much more detail will be forthcoming in the road test, but in short, the 8000rpm 4.0-litre V8 from the F8 Tributo is deployed, only with the two turbochargers repositioned for a lower centre of gravity and modifications to the injection for better propagation. Between this V8 and a dual-clutch gearbox then sits one of the SF90’s three electric motors – a slim axial-flux motor a mere 72mm thick that’s complemented by two cylindrical motors on the front axle, one for each wheel.
It’s this electric front axle that gives the SF90 whisper-quiet running capability, and although just 15 miles of EV range seems nominal, the ability to go ‘incognito’ adds likeable civility to this otherwise very loud and sometimes painfully ostentatious ownership proposition.
Part of its success in this area is down to the calibration of its numerous propulsion sources into a cohesive, singular entity. You might notice in the handling the effects of the engine and motors operating to different extents, but beyond the engine waking up, there’s never even a ripple when it comes to the delivery of unified power and torque.
You just get crisply responsive, linear force, and the revised eight-speed dual-clutch gearbox is utterly clinical on upshifts, which land with the kind of violent precision that makes them an event in themselves. It’s all this, along with the chassis balance and fine ride, that makes the SF90 an exquisite car on the right road, even if you never use more than half its performance. Or even a third.
Reservations? I have a few. With the front motors, luggage space is very poor and rules out the SF90 for even weekends away. The road-roar at high speeds doesn’t help matters, though avoiding the Assetto Fiorano pack may ameliorate this. Still, if you owned an F8 Tributo alongside your SF90, I suspect you would use the junior model far more often.
Equally, if you’re after the last word in track-day engagement and it has to be a Ferrari, the old 488 Pista is lighter, with a more playful personality and even finer steering. It also costs half what the SF90 does – as does the new Lamborghini Huracán STO, whose V10 is the soulful antidote for both Ferraris’ comparatively dull flat-plane V8s.
There's a sense with the SF90 that you're paying a premium for a technological showcase, and as ever, such cars have their vices and look can seem very questionable value for money compared to the incumbents. With options, this test car costs £523,460.
Should I buy one?
Is the SF90 a car without any real use case, then? Perhaps. And although you could argue that many supercars court that description, this 986bhp plug-in feels more that way inclined than most. For the money being asked, it should be more usable and better-defined, even if there will be no shortage of people willing to pay up for the most powerful and sophisticated Ferrari road car in history.
But details aside, let’s also say that with the SF90 Ferrari has transitioned into the hybrid era spectacularly well. Stronger ergonomics and a less stratospheric asking price will come with future PHEV Ferrari models, but the mastery of complex powertrain elements is arguably of more importance in this day and age, and it’s here the SF90 undoubtedly excels. Has any car ever been quite so unhinged yet somehow reassuring?
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2021-10-17 23:06:53Z
CBMibGh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmF1dG9jYXIuY28udWsvY2FyLXJldmlldy9mZXJyYXJpL3NmOTAtc3RyYWRhbGUvZmlyc3QtZHJpdmVzL2ZlcnJhcmktc2Y5MC1zdHJhZGFsZS0yMDIxLXVrLXJldmlld9IBAA
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