FERRARI BRINGS THE HORSES
Chased by the competition, the Italians gallop back to the front of a very select herd
It’s not easy following an icon and, understand this clearly, Ferrari’s 458, for all its warts and shortcomings, was nothing if not iconic. It’s also easy to forget — mainly because we are talking Ferrari here — but such superiority wasn’t always part of the entry-level repertoire.
The original — the Pininfarinastyled 308 — will live long in our consciousness, immortalized by no less than The Moustache himself, Thomas Magnum. But subsequent iterations were sometimes, well, less than iconic.
Ferrari finally got its act together in 2005 with the F430, but really, it wasn’t until 2009’s 458 that the experience matched the legend, the Italia handling and comportment finally matching the high-revving V8’s sound and fury. In other words, Ferrari’s new 488 has a lot to live up to.
One thing you don’t have to worry about is speed. The 488, Spider or otherwise, is fast. Mondo fast. Blinding, in fact. The engine may have been downsized from the 458’s 4.5 litres to 3.9 L, but it has been twice turbocharged and the result is, as they say, prodigious — 670 horsepower of prodigious, as a matter of fact. The influx of horsepower is backed up by an equally inordinate 560 pound-feet of torque. That’s some 63 hp more than even the most steroidal of 458’s, the final-year Speciale edition.
It’s a monstrous affair, good enough to accelerate the moderately priced Spider (compared with, say, a La Ferrari or an 812 Superfast) to 100 kilometres an hour in a very hypercar-like 3.0 seconds. And, unlike the 458, you don’t really have to fiddle with the paddle-shifting seven-speed all that much to liberate all its go juice; those twin turbos mean there’s plenty of jam from way down low. Where the 458 was merely responsive at four grand, the 488 — again, thanks to those turbochargers — is downright muscular.
It still sounds good. As long as you don’t compare it with the 458 that was, let’s be frank, the most melodious V8.
Of course, there’s more to the Spider than just the sound — enjoy it while you can! — of internal combustion. Fourteen seconds after you’ve toggled the button, you can be driving open topped in what was just a hardtop Ferrari. Like all such retractable hardtops — and this one is similar to that used in the 458 — it’s a balletic little minuet as levers fold, panels divide and then, like the finale of a perfect Swan Lake, all returns to normal, the lines so clean that one never suspected the Spider ever even had a top.
A 488 is gorgeous; a Spider with its top down is pretty much everyone’s fantasy of open-top motoring. Purists will make much of the Spider’s extra 50 kilograms — mostly in structural reinforcements to make up for the lack of a roof — but ignore them, they know not of what they speak. Wind in your hair and more-soulful exhaust music? More than worth the avoirdupois.
The Spider’s cabin is quite — some might say surprisingly — modern. I say surprising because modernity hasn’t always been the calling card of the Ferrari interior. Indeed, some of the 488’s predecessors were seemingly always a generation behind the lesser cars it hoped to belittle. The controls, especially the Manetinno’s vehicle setting control on the steering wheel, fall readily to hand. Yes, the infotainment/ navigation screen is small, but unlike previous Ferrari systems (this time I include the 458), they actually work. This is especially welcome in the navigation department, because previous systems (again, including the 458’s) were slow and dated.
This Ferrari is, well, surprisingly comfortable. More specifically, the suspension, thanks to the magnetorheologically adjustable suspension, has a wide range of damping adjustability that — yes, I am saying this about a Ferrari — borders on the supple. The suspension adjusts its stiffness by sending electric signals to the fluid used in its dampers. Said fluid contains microscopic magnetic particles that can either thicken the fluid (stiffen the damping) or render it thinner (softening the damping).
Because the electrical adjustment operates directly on the suspension’s fluid, rather than physically altering some mechanical valving in the dampers, the Ferrari system can react more quickly than lesser systems. The result is a halfway decent ride. There is even — shades of civility — a “bumpy road” mode, this civil comportment obviously important to Ferrari.
The one downside of all this new-found civility is that the 488 isn’t quite as unique as its predecessor. Yes, it is faster. As I said, it is also technically more sophisticated, substantially more ergonomic and dramatically better built than Ferraris of yore. In every quantifiable comparison, the new 488 is a superior product to its predecessor. It is, in fact, most assuredly the best, fastest and most complete supercar in its segment.
But it’s just not as “bad” as the 458.