‘Traditional beauty with courageous modernity’

PEOPLE TELL me I shouldn’t like modern Ferraris. That they’re gracelessly technocratic, contrived and without the Da Vinci beauty so evident in cars like the 250 GTO and the Dino.

But to my eyes the LaFerrari is a heart-flutteringly handsome car. And the recently unveiled 488 Pista is a shape that grabs a hold of my heart in that way Italian supercars should. The 488 Pista a product of Ferrari’s 80-strong Maranello design centre, led by Flavio Manzoni. Established to bring Ferrari design in-house after decades of third-party collaboration, this was the answer to a problem that had, according to Manzoni, become very real: the artful integration of mechanical, electronic and aerodynamic systems of a complexity that begs belief. Creating a supercar has become a job for a singular entity, with no cracks down which marginal gains could be lost.

‘Now, as designers, we start work immediately together with the pre-engineering team,’ Manzoni told me last year. ‘We cannot do our job if we start after the pre-engineering phase.’

The results, I think, speak for themselves. The Pista is Manzoni’s team delicately balancing countless compromises: the engineering ideal and the perfect form; F1 aero without the F1 ugliness; nods to the past that don’t suffocate the present. If any one factor should swing out of balance the result will be compromised. McLaren, for example, deliberately let aero function override form: the result is the Senna.

On the delicate balance of the past and the present, Manzoni was particularly eloquent: ‘There is a fantastic sentence from the architect Renzo Piano. He said that good design is “suspended between the prudence of tradition and the courage of modernity”.’

Traditional beauty with courageous modernity – that’s the 488 Pista.

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