The Coolest Ferrari Ever—Drive Carefully !

Interesting article

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703806304576233171018925798.html?mod=WSJ_hp_mostpop_read


Imagine the Alps, perfected. Each breath tastes of diamonds. Snow-laced massifs vault into a dark-blue sky and green hills cascade to the valleys below, a panoptic of edelweiss and immortality. Here the cowbells play Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" and busty women in over-tight dirndls repair the roads.

Now imagine all this upside down, flying past your windshield at 32 feet per second squared as you plunge to your picturesque Alpine death in the Ferrari FF. And everything was going so well.

While your four-seat, all-wheel-drive, 651-horsepower, $300,000 grand touring car paints a target on some snowy roof far below, your mind will be processing quickly. Did I let the cat out? What is Berlusconi's problem, anyway? And how, exactly, did this happen? Alas, the last thing to go through your mind is the fitted luggage. Slurg!

Photos: Supercar on Ice
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Dan Neil/The Wall Street Journal
.
.But as to the last question: You are a victim of irrational exuberance.

You want my snap verdict on the new FF? Fine. This is absolutely the coolest Ferrari of all time, "cool" insofar as it delivers brain-solvent performance without looking like it gives a damn what you think, cool insofar as its radical Pininfarina styling (a "shooting brake," or three-door hatch GT) waves a contemptuous finger at conventional wisdom. This is a car that despises prettiness and mocks your bourgeois notions of sleek and rakish, which are stylistic sideshows of aerodynamics, anyway. Yes, I agree, the car looks like a toilet brush on wheels, but how monumentally gutsy it is for Ferrari to even think such a thing, much less commit hundreds of millions of euros to its execution. My God. Ferrari? The most self-satisfied car company on earth dares to put its weight on such a limb? It's downright epic.

I'm not saying I wouldn't change a thing. The front fender vents and fluting along the side (reminiscent of the Ferrari California) seem pointless and fussy; and the daft, leering view of the car head-on makes it look as if it's auditioning for "Pokémon." But the shooting-brake conformation is so utterly right that it takes on the aspect of preordination. Ferrari just had to build it.

Oh yes, right, you're plunging to your death. I'll get back to you on that.

It's impossible to know what weight Ferrari lent to its competitors' offerings—execs would scoff, Ferrari has no competitors!—but it should be noted Porsche and Bentley each sell ballistic GTs with four seats, generous boots and all-wheel drive. These are cars that owners might use to drive to their homes in St. Moritz and Aspen. I know I would. The FF is a diabolically clever way to answer these market challenges without actually acknowledging them. No stooping to conquer.

Thanks to its bread-van shape, the FF is surprisingly spacious, with 16 cubic feet behind the upright rear seats (more than a BMW 7-series trunk) and nearly 29 cubic feet with seats down—enough, Ferrari assures us, to stow two sets of scuba gear. Or, may I mildly suggest, groceries. And while you wouldn't want to retire in them, the FF's back seats are actually pretty comfortable for a 6-footer like me. In addition to the golf-bag metric (the FF will hold two), Ferrari suggests two strollers can be put in the back, and you can even get Ferrari-red child safety seats. Interesting.

The 651-horsepower, $300,000 Ferrari FF doesn't care about prettiness. What it does best is speed. In a nutshell, it is absolutely the coolest Ferrari of all time, says Rumble Seat columnist Dan Neil.
.There has always been a reek of attachment disorder with Ferraris, i.e., losers with money; but the ideal FF buyer has a spouse—husband or wife—and actually wants to take the family on the road with him/her. I'd note that Ferrari Chairman Luca di Montezemolo, age 64, has an infant son. I wonder: Did he just build himself a car?

But you want numbers. Here they are: The FF is an aluminum space-frame car with a direct-injection, 6.3-liter V12 mounted front-midships: dry-sump lubrication (naturally); 12.3:1 compression ratio; variable valve timing, variable intake and exhaust geometry; all leading to a hearty 103 hp/liter of naturally aspirated displacement. The engine character is free spinning, hugely flexible, orchestral, a grand bargain between suppleness and stunning mechanical leverage. Max horsepower is 651 and max torque is 504 pound-feet, 80% of which is on tap from 1,000 to 8,000 rpm.

Ferrari puts the 0-to-62-mph acceleration at 3.7 seconds and the top speed at 207 mph, which makes this car, on paper at least, the fastest four-seater in the world and second-fastest Ferrari GT after the track-bonkers 599 GTO. And I can personally attest to the sheer, lung-flattening, heart-pounding kinesiology of the car. The FF isn't the sweating bottle on nitrogylcerine that the 458 Italia is, but it's still mighty fast. To kick down two gears and stamp the gas is to light a very large, exploding cigar.

2010 Ferrari FF

Dan Neil/The Wall Street Journal

When the road goes lousy, you dial in a Manettino switch to one of two new settings: Wet and Ice-Snow.
.Base price: $300,000 (est.)
Price as tested: $325,000 (est.)
Powertrain: Naturally aspirated, direct-injection 6.3-liter, 48-valve DOHC V12 with variable valve timing, induction geometry and exhaust; seven-speed dual-clutch rear transaxle with two-speed multiclutch front power transfer unit; all-wheel drive.
Horsepower/torque: 651 hp at 8,000 rpm/504 pound-feet at 6,000 rpm
Length/weight: 193.2 inches/4,144 pounds
Wheelbase: 117.7 inches
0-62 mph: 3.7 seconds
0-124 mph: 11 seconds
Top speed: 208 mph
EPA fuel economy: 11/18 mpg, city/highway
Cargo capacity: 16 cubic feet (rear seats up); 29 cubic feet (seats down)
.On the other side of the efficiency ledger, the FF has an electric air-conditioning pump; variable fuel pump and engine fan; and optional stop-start system as part of the HELE (High Emotions-Low Emissions) kit. With a Euro rating of 360 grams of carbon/kilometer, the FF will probably get about 11/18 mpg, city/highway, under the U.S. system.

She's a big monkey: 16.1 feet long and 6.5 feet wide, weighing about 4,144 pounds (weight distribution 47/53, front/rear). The rear transaxle consists of a seven-speed, dual-clutch sequential gearbox—no standard gearbox is available—abetted with Ferrari's E-Diff, the company's torque-vectoring system that channels twist to the outside rear wheel in corners to help pivot the car. Like the 599GTB, the FF uses magnetic suspension dampers behind the front wishbones and rear multilinks. Brakes? Forget it. Mortals' minds are too puny to comprehend their carbon-ceramic massiveness.

So far the car is pretty G.I. for a new Ferrari GT. Big, fast, upholstered by Croesus' saddle maker, and endowed with horsepower that would count as its own weather system. However, the FF's other bit of iconoclasm is its all-wheel-drive system (FF=Ferrari Four). A novel solution, it comprises a compact (6.7 inches deep) two-speed gearbox running off the front of the engine crank, driving the front wheels up to speeds of 124 mph (fourth gear). The so-called Power Transfer Unit is actuated by a multiplate clutch pack doing the bidding of the car's dynamic handling computers. Up to 20% of engine torque can be channeled through the PTU, which like the rear transaxle provides side-to-side torque vectoring to help the car maintain the desired line.

On dry pavement the PTU stays in the background and the FF handles like the run-of-the-mill, license-murdering, grand-touring Godzilla it is, which is to say, very much a rear-drive car. With the car's Manettino system in Sport mode, you can pitch the car into a hairpin, get it to over-rotate and then pin the tail down with the throttle. Here I'd love to lionize my driving talent, but the truth is, with Ferrari's current generation of dynamics software, Betty White could drift this car.

The steering feels little over-assisted for my taste but it's as precise as a helium laser. With the all-season tires a touch of understeer sneaks past the computers, but it's surely cured by the summer Pirellis.

When the road goes lousy, you dial in a Manettino switch to one of two new settings: Wet and Ice-Snow. The computers dial back throttle and steering response, slow the gear shifting, turn up the stability intervention, and otherwise do everything possible to keep the car manageable.

But here's where there's potential for mischief, and joining the Tyrolean Air Force. The FF, says the company, is designed to deliver extreme performance in the most inhospitable low-grip conditions. Thus spake the press release: "Effortlessly copes with low grip conditions…superb high-performance starts from standstill even on the slipperiest, snowiest and iciest of surfaces.…"

Got it? Supercar on ice.

To prove it, Ferrari thoughtfully helicoptered two FFs to the top of a ski resort, where a track had been plowed into the snow. And sure enough, the FF chewed through the snowy hairpins and esses like some six-figure Subaru, with the computers furiously stuttering the brakes, vectoring the torque, nulling out rotation. You could practically smell the silicon smoldering. Ferrari's code-writers make the Google guys look like bathroom attendants.

What could be wrong with any of that? Only one little thing. The car still weighs more than two tons! And no matter how quick the computers or how clever the AWD is, you still have to remember to increase your braking distances as speeds increase. The FF's data-constructed low-grip handling is so reassuring, so empowering, so convincing in its illusion of actual grip, one just might drive into the postcard. It's a bird. It's a plane. It's another victim of irrational exuberance.

Not a bad way to go, I must say.

Corrections and Amplifications
This article has been corrected. The car statistics initially gave the 0-62 mph time as 3.7 inches instead of 3.7 seconds.