Italian automaker has returned to its roots
THE MONZA RED AND PRANCING HORSE EMBLEM SAY IT ALL
The first thing you notice is the silence. This is a Ferrari, after all, its bulging fenders the requisite Monza Red, twin large-bore tailpipes exiting high in the rear fascia and a big Prancing Horse emblem in the middle of the steering column. And yet, there’s not a sound.
You know there’s tasty V8 lurking back there. You definitely saw it, even if it is buried deeper into the chassis than ever before. It’s a 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8 with 769 horsepower — at 8,000 rpm no less. And yet there is not a peep from its 9.5:1 pistons or new, high-volume turbochargers.
That’s because the SF90 is a plug-in hybrid. And unlike other hypercars that boast all manner of electrification but deliver little in the way of true electric-car performance or range, the SF90 feels like a real PHEV.
Thanks to having three electric motors — two powering the front wheels independently and another axial flux affair sandwiched between gas engine and dual-clutch transmission — the SF90 can cruise at 135 km/h on battery power alone.
The only other plug-in hybrid I have tested that can do that is the RAV4 Prime. The Ferrari does it with ease, and if not for a factory-imposed limit of 135, I think the SF might hit 150 or even 160 km/h using electric power alone.
A bit of an oddity is that the rear motor — labelled P2 in Ferrari parlance — is sandwiched between crankshaft and gearbox, meaning it can’t drive the wheels in EV mode; only the front two (88 kw) motors are working when silent running.
So yes, although Ferrari officially labels the SF90 as an E-AWD vehicle, in EV mode at least, it is both electric and front-wheel drive. We do indeed live in a brave new world.
Then you switch the SF’S new E-manettino — as in Energy, because it controls the engine and electric motors — into Performance mode and all hell breaks loose. It rasps. It roars. It screams. Jimi Hendrix’s Voodoo Child solo has nothing on the frenzy that is the SF90 as it claws its way past 8,000 rpm. Even that is a surprise.
I don’t know what they’ve done to the SF. It can’t be that the pistons are a minuscule 1.5 millimetres larger. Boosting an engine from 3,902 cubic centimetres to just 3,990 cc doesn’t (normally) change its personality. It might be that the axial-flux electric motor at the end of the crankshaft encourages the big V8 to rev harder.
Maybe the engine’s incredibly low placement — the engine sits some 15 mm lower in the chassis than previous Ferraris — has freed up space for some titanium exhaust trickery.
Whatever the case, in the first three gears (there are eight!) it sounds like a superbike. Oh, there’s a little turbo lag below 3,000 rpm.
But once it comes to full boil, it feels like somebody has tossed the flywheels overboard, so quickly does the big V8 jet from 4,000 to 9,000 rpm.
Some might say that’s hardly surprising. After all, between the three electric motors and the twin-turbocharged V8, there’s a total of 986 horsepower. But the Laferrari had only 37 fewer horses and it didn’t feel anywhere near this savage. Nor did it accelerate to 100 km/h in 2.5 seconds.
There’s also a decided determination from the steering that’s been missing in Ferrari cars since the 458. The Stradale can’t quite match the Speciale’s incredible turn-in speed, but despite being heavier than the 488, the SF90 handles switchbacks way better.
It might be the new, more rigid chassis. It could be the V8 engine being lower in its cradle and the 72 kilograms of 8.0-kilowatt hour battery built into the platform’s floor and a lower centre of gravity. Or maybe it’s the result of the torque vectoring allowed by the RAC-E full-electric front axle.
Whatever the case, once the SF plants its inside front tires at an apex, they refuse to give an inch no matter how many Gs you throw at them.
Indeed, while much of media will focus on the fact that the SF90 is Ferrari’s first plug-in hybrid and that it offers 25 kilometres of emissions-free motoring, the real headline — at least for me — is that, with the Stradale, Ferrari has returned to its less-than-perfectly-sensible roots.
The highest compliment I can pay is that the SF90 is the rebirth of the 458, only electrified and amplified — including, unfortunately, its base price of $599,341. Silence, it appears, doesn’t come cheap.