Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 13 i Enzo

THIS MORNING’S PAPER warned of mass unemployment and of a surge in Covid-19 infections, and revealed that Scuderia Ferrari has got its sums hopelessly wrong and will begin the F1 season with an aero package that doesn’t work. Just another Wednesday, then. We’ve become so accustomed to receiving bad news that we’d almost forgotten there was any other kind, so it is a treat to be able to report that the Ferrari market is in decent shape, all things considered. The HAGI F, an index tracking the values of key collectable Ferraris, is up 15.19 per cent for the year to May – an astonishing figure given that every other HAGI marque index is in negative territory over the same period. That there have been any values for the folks…

THE GREATEST DRIVE? IF YOU’VE BEEN lucky enough to drive a few Ferraris, how do you narrow that down to a single occasion? Ruling out the racing cars and any I’ve driven only on a track helps, but only a bit. And were it not for a single day in the late summer of 2018, I’d still be scratching my head. But then the call came from editor Barker. It went something like this: Him: ‘You’ve always claimed the 365 GTC/4 and 365 GTB/4 to be respectively the most under-and overrated Ferraris of all. Want to find out for sure?’ Me: ‘I’m on my way.’ It was better than I could have hoped. To have a great drive in a Ferrari, you need much more than a great Ferrari. Or…

IT’S ALMOST 30 YEARS AGO, but the memory still has the power to reach out and send a shiver down my spine. It was the cover story of the October 1992 issue of Performance Car, four decades of the world’s fastest car, from Daytona to then-new Jaguar XJ220, and I had been assigned the Daytona to describe toPC’s loyal readership. In truth I was still fairly new to the car magazine game; I’d driven only a couple of Ferraris, a 308 GT4 and a 348tb, certainly nothing like a Daytona (is there anything quite like a Daytona?). And here I was, about to meet a hero car from my late-60s childhood, and, what’s more, one that belonged to a hero from my teenage years, Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason no less.…

There’s always a compromise, a sacrifice. It might be extra weight blunting the performance, dynamics knocked slightly out of focus by reduced torsional stiffness, more noise, vibration and harshness… and for what: the sun on your face and wind in your hair? You certainly pay for those privileges in the F8 Spider, the base price going up by around 10 per cent versus the F8 Tributo, to £226k, but the rest? I’m struggling to detect any dynamic difference. Cost apart, the choice between berlinetta and spider is more about aesthetics than anything else. In the same way that the Tributo employs a slightly different version of the 488 Pista’s 710bhp, twin-turbo V8 and advanced aerodynamics, so the F8 Spider follows the lead of the Pista Spider. So instead of a…

It’s been a while, but you don’t forget. Actually that’s not true. For my sins I’ve forgotten entirely the car I went to drive at Goodwood that day, for it was not the Ferrari 250 SWB in which Stirling Moss won his seventh and final TT at this very track in 1961. I was the editor ofMotorSport magazine and, idiot that I clearly am, I’d sent my deputy Matthew Franey to drive the Ferrari. But it was there, and I was too, so… well, you would, wouldn’t you? So I did. For me, the SWB and the GTO it sired sit at the absolute apex of Ferrari’s GTs, though perhaps my greatest actual love is for the earlier, trickier Tour de France. But it was with the Short Wheelbase that…

Ferrari rarely makes a mis-step. When it launched the 575M Maranello as a replacement for the 550 in the spring of 2002, the new car came with a welcome shot of extra power and sophistication. But, with an eye to creating a wider audience, particularly in the States, it also came with a softer ride. Fine for boulevards, not so good for undulating cross-country roads, where keen drivers soon found the nose and/or belly of their expensive new Ferrari grounding out in compressions. The European press, in particular, didn’t pull its punches. To its credit, Ferrari responded swiftly. In a matter of weeks, cars in build were having a subtle tweak to the software for the adaptive suspension control unit, and cars that had already been delivered were given the…

MY FIRST DRIVE IN A FERRARI was a long time coming. Growing up in Birkenhead during the ’70s didn’t help; I can’t recall seeing a single Ferrari on the road there, or even parked up. The only glimpses of one had been the occasional ogle through the crowds at the London motor show. In fact, my first brush with a Ferrari came on a Club 89 trackday at Silverstone, when I managed to blag a ride in the then-just-released 348. I came away unimpressed: it sounded dull and, on the long straights of Silverstone, felt only averagely rapid compared to my heavily tweaked Lotus Elan Sprint that I’d brought along that day. By the mid-90s, I was doing okay and decided to upgrade my much-loved but slightly tatty E30 M3…

‘It had been the longest ever disruption to production in Ferrari’s 73-year history’ A FERRARI MONZA SP2 leaving the production line wouldn’t normally be a harbinger of normality, but in a strange way that’s just what the limited-run, ¤1.6m roadster represented for Ferrari employees. The Monza (above) had been hours from being finished when Ferrari announced the suspension of production due to Covid-19 on Saturday March 14, and so it sat untouched on the Special Series line for seven weeks until production finally resumed on Monday May 4 under Ferrari’s Back on Track initiative. It had been the longest ever disruption to Ferrari production in the company’s 73-year history, and the restart came three weeks later than the originally planned April 14 date, which coincided with the peak in Italy’s…

1:8-scale FXX-K Evo by Amalgam The FXX-K Evo is no classical beauty, but few cars make a more dramatic entrance, and Amalgam has perfectly modelled every eye-popping inch of the bodywork – from the little canards at the front to the huge, twin-profile wing at the rear – as well as the all-business interior and the engine bay. £9670 | amalgamcollection.com Technical drawing t-shirt Arriving just in time for the start of the delayed 2020 season, this official Scuderia Ferrari shirt is one for the F1 fan who enjoys the battle between brainbox engineers as much as the on-track action. £65 | store.ferrari.com LaFerrari sculpture by Antoine Dufilho French artist Antoine Dufilho has added a LaFerrari to his ‘Sequential’ series, an ever-growing flfleet of landmark cars rendered using precision-cut, closely…

OCTANE MAGAZINE managed to pull together quite the collection for the cover story of its 200th issue: eight of Ferrari’s supercars, from 288 GTO to LaFerrari. I didn’t hesitate when I was asked to write it and was thrilled to find that included was one of the rarest of the rare, the 288 GTO Evoluzione. I hadn’t even seen one in the metal/Kevlar-carbon, and now I was about to drive it. The eight divided neatly into three groups. The first batch would be 288 GTO, Evoluzione and F40, the second the standard F40, F40 GT and F40 LM, and the final grouping F50, Enzo and LaFerrari – the V12s. I was fascinated by the Evoluzione. Parked between 288 and F40, it was so clearly the missing link, all its scoops,…

SUNSET, MY FAVOURITE ROAD IN THE WORLD, a naturally aspirated V12 kissing its rev-limiter over and over again, and all while following in the wake of three other outrageous supercars from Maranello… The greatest drive I’ve ever had in a Ferrari played out like a Hollywood fantasy. Albeit one shot in North Wales. However, the seeds for this drive and one of the most extraordinary few days of my life were sowed on overcrowded, unremarkable roads in Ascot, Berkshire, a few months earlier at no more than 35mph. In fact, I suppose you could trace it back to a phone call a few weeks before that from a friend ofevo magazine. ‘Hi Jethro,’ the conversation started, ‘we need to get some cars out to Spa for the FIA GT Championship.…

For the past decade or so, the motor industry has been on a downsizing mission. Not in the size of the cars it makes – quite the opposite, unfortunately – but in the cylinder capacity of those cars’ engines. Downsizing, done well, means you get the same amount of power while consuming less fuel and carrying less weight. Environmental pressures, and the fiscal ones that follow, give manufacturers a strong incentive to downsize. And that, nearly always, involves turbocharging. It’s against this background that Ferrari developed the V8 engine intended to supplant the F136 series, the versatile unit that had powered the F430, various Maseratis and, with direct injection, the California and 458. This new V8 was smaller, lower, shorter, lighter, feistier. It featured a pair of IHI turbochargers and…

Well, I wasn’t expecting that. Behind slow traffic approaching a hill with a crawler lane, traffic moves to the left, I nail the Portofino and scoot past the lot in one neat lunge… except that when the near-600bhp twin-turbo V8 hits peak power, I go ever so slightly dizzy. Dang! It really has been a while. Twelve weeks and five days to be exact. That was when I last drove for pleasure, or work, which for a motoring writer is pretty much the same thing. Three months of only essential journeys. It got to the point that when I plugged my phone into the car, the route it showed me was to the supermarket. Yep, in three months, my longest and most frequent drive was the 11-mile run to a…

IN MID-JUNE, Ferrari sent a further signal that some normality was returning when Scuderia Ferrari delivered a unique dawn chorus in Maranello. In the Officina Classiche department inside the factory, which used to be the racing workshop, the F1 team fired up the SF1000, its current GP contender, and Charles Leclerc drove it out through the famous entrance and onto the public road. With the approval of the local council, he then drove the short distance to the Fiorano test track where Ferrari used to test all its F1 cars and where it still shakes down development prototypes of every new road car. Leclerc’s route took him past the offices where Scuderia Ferrari designs its F1 cars and past the Ferrari Museum en route to Fiorano. The test track is…

While the similarities between the new SF90 Stradale and the LaFerrari are obvious, the differences also need to be scrupulously observed. The LaFerrari is one of the elite group of Ferrari’s ‘special’ cars, the limited editions that only the brand’s best friends and most loyal customers stand a chance of being allowed to purchase. Whereas the SF90 is one of Ferrari’s regular production models, the sort available to mere mortals, and it comes with no defined production limit and a pricetag that, in most parts of the world, is less than half that of its illustrious predecessor. Yet the comparison is unavoidable, as is the proof of how fast the sharp end of the supercar game is moving. Just seven years after launching the LaFerrari – a car that was…

THIS WAS ONE HOT CAR. It was known officially as the Ferrari 250 GT Competizione; unofficially, along with 19 others of its type, it was a ‘SEFAC Hot Rod’, so heat was obviously part of the package. But this lightweight version of the delicious 250 GT SWB was hot for another reason. I drove it in the hills near Geneva in July 2005, on an unbelievably hot day. I was already a touch fatigued from an ultra-early start for the Easyjet out of Luton, and the scorching heat on top of that rendered the Ferrari encounter almost dream-like. Bordering on the hallucinatory. This bright white, competition-prepared 250 SWB, its hue searing any retina not protected by sunglasses that day, had among its weight-saving measures no cabin insulation, no headlining and…

Sixty years ago, Ferrari began a sixyear winning streak at Le Mans that was unprecedented in the race’s history. Equally remarkably, the last of those six wins, in 1965, would be the last time a Ferrari would win the race outright, prefacing a period of Ford and Porsche dominance. The factory team arrived at Circuit de la Sarthe as clear favourites. The previously dominant Jaguar D-type’s time had passed, and 1959 winner Aston Martin had left to focus on F1 (though privateers entered examples of the DBR1 victorious the previous year). Ferrari, as you may have read on the previous pages, had won with a 250 TR in 1958 and it had also placed third to two Astons in ’59. The red cars duly delivered: paired in the factory 250…

It is the Easter Meeting at Goodwood on Bank Holiday Monday, April 23, 1962. In the pits sits a Ferrari in the pale, sage green colours of the British Racing Partnership. It’s waiting for Event Five on the fixture list, the Sussex Trophy, the big sports car race. All that’s in the way is Event Four, the Glover Trophy for Formula 1 cars. The Ferrari’s driver is out there and has just set the fastest lap of the race. He’ll be along in a minute. And together they will create what will be one of the greatest combinations of man and machine ever known. But it never happens: for reasons unknown, his Lotus 18/21 leaves the track at the fast right leading into St Mary’s and buries itself in the…

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