SF90: can its new 986bhp hypercar future-proof Ferrari?
This, then, is it. Everything Maranello’s learned from its hybrid LaFerrari and F1 cars, distilled into the all-wheel-drive, V8/electric SF90. We drive the hypercar that must safeguard Ferrari’s future
The Ferrari SF90 has more sides than a dodecahedron with dissociative identity disorder. A demon track weapon one minute, a relaxing cross-continent cruiser the next, it’s the heaviest Ferrari sports car ever built, yet can lap Ferrari’s Fiorano track as quickly as the lightest. Depending on which driving mode you select, it can either keep a Bugatti Chiron honest from the lights – or be shown the door by a supermini. And if you pull away sharply on a loose surface in its eDrive EV mode, during which the V8 and the rear axle take a little nap, you’ll discover one more mind-bending fact: the SF90 is, at least some of the time, Ferrari’s first front-wheel-drive production car. Unprecedented times, indeed.
Ferrari claims the SF90 launch was put back from March to early July because of the coronavirus outbreak. But maybe it was just to give the SF90 the chance to get its story straight. What exactly is this car for? And is it any good at it?
What it most definitely isn’t, despite an ability to out-sprint it in a straight line and match its Fiorano lap time, is a replacement for the limited-edition carbon-bodied, V12-powered LaFerrari hypercar. Built around a new but still mostly aluminium chassis, and powered by a hybridised twin-turbo V8, the SF90 is a regular production car, like the F8 Tributo. Only one that costs 85 per cent more.
For all the clever tech Ferrari has packed into the SF90, the price is one of the smartest things about it. The SF90 costs £376,048 in standard trim, or £39,360 more in sportier Assetto Fiorano spec. Dip into the options list – or Ferrari’s personalisation programme – and you could probably spend half a mill without breaking sweat. That’s serious money, and with production likely to reach a couple of thousand cars per year, a nice earner for Ferrari.
What else is a rich, but not revoltingly rich, Ferrari lover to do, but fork out for it? There’s not actually much available to buy in the void between junior supercars like the £203k F8 Tributo and full-blown hypercar like the now dead £1.2m+ LaFerrari, either from Ferrari or anyone else.
And even if you can afford the next LaFerrari, so too can more people than there will be cars to go round. With SF90, you’ve got a good chance of nabbing one without having to prove you’ve bought every Ferrari since Fiorano was a turnip field.
LaFerrari was a hybrid too, but while a few owners convinced Ferrari to update their cars to be able to run purely on electric power, that wasn’t part of the original plan. But times change, laws change and so do the mindsets of owners. These days, enjoying supercars and caring for things like city air quality needn’t be mutually exclusive.
Although, as a low-volume manufacturer, Ferrari doesn’t have the headache of meeting the same 95g/km fleet-average CO2 target as VW or Ford, like McLaren it’s still bound by a promise to reduce its own emissions. Which is why, like it or not, this latest Ferrari is a hybrid.
It won’t be the only one. If you were slightly disappointed that Ferrari chose to facelift the already facelifted 488 to create the F8 Tributo rather than make a brand new car, this is the answer – this and the smaller V6 hybrid sports car it will spin from the same platform.
We don’t yet know much about the baby V6, or the hybrid SUV also in the works that will benefit from some of the same technology. But we’re about the find out plenty about the SF90, which is waiting for us just inside the famous factory entrance.
The SF90 doesn’t have the visual draw of a LaFerrari-grade hypercar, but compared to the F8 Tributo it looks, fuller, wider, weightier. Wider it isn’t, but weightier it most definitely is. Adding four-wheel drive and hybrid ⊲
THE HEAVIEST FERRARI SPORTS CAR YET BUILT, IT CAN LAP FIORANO AS QUICKLY AS THE LIGHTEST
power has brought significant ballast; ballast that even a new-era aluminium chassis incorporating carbonfibre bulkhead elements can’t hope to offset. Ferrari claims a 1570kg weight, compared with 1330kg for the reardrive, non-hybrid F8. And that’s a dry weight, so not comparable with the numbers from, say, Porsche. Think closer to 1700kg with a beefy driver and a full complement of fluids. Worrying.
Worrying too is the sound on start-up. Prod the button at the base of the wheel and there’s no eruption, just a gentle, brief, synthesised zizzzz to let you know the car is ready. Wait, what? After all the build-up, the anticipation, the numbers, that’s it? It’s like watching Hitchcock’s Psycho for the first time, witnessing the lead character get stabbed to death at the halfway mark and thinking, ‘Er, okay, so now what?’
Yep, unless you select Performance or Qualifying midway through the process, the fastest roadgoing Ferrari of all time defaults to Hybrid mode at start-up. But rather than immediately send the V8 its draft notice, let’s roll with it. In fact, let’s double down and investigate the fourth option on the steering wheel’s new e-manettino powertrain mode selector: eDrive.
In eDrive the V8, the new eight-speed dual-clutch transmission and the single e-motor sandwiched between them all take a back seat. All forward propulsion comes from the two electric motors mounted in the nose, which draw on a 7.9kWh battery on the rear bulkhead to send up to 217bhp to the road and give you an electric-only range of 15.5 miles. And a sound like a clandestine forklift truck time trial in an Amazon warehouse.
You don’t need to be manning the Countdown whiteboard to realise that a 1570kg car with 217bhp isn’t going to feel especially rapid. Ferrari says its performance target was a mid-spec Golf, and that in EV mode the SF90 was never meant to be a Tesla rival. So while Porsche’s seven-year-old 918 Spyder could whir from zero to 62mph in 6.2sec, the SF90 needs 9.3.
Objectively, that’s more than enough to keep up with any trac, but is it really enough to keep up with the expectations you have of something wearing the Ferrari badge? And subjectively, the throttle tip-in – that reaction you get when you first hit the right pedal – is unusually soft by EV standards, which makes the SF90 a very relaxing, if unexciting, EV. It’s also worth noting that no matter how hard you mash the throttle, the combustion engine will never intervene to spare your blushes.
Pointless pontificating, Ferrari would say, because Hybrid mode gives the best of both worlds. And it really does. The big surprise is how often Hybrid mode devolves to EV power, dropping the V8 out whenever possible, and seamlessly pulling it back into play when you need it. But the even bigger surprise is the natural feel you get from the brakes; a key point of communication with a supercar, but so often a disaster on cars that use braking to regenerate energy.
That slick blending of the two power sources is not just technically impressive, it adds something to Ferrari’s mid-engined cars we haven’t seen before: GT-style refinement. As we meander south from Maranello in trac too dense to be picked off, you’re aware of just how easy the SF90 is to drive. You still have access to all 986bhp when you need it, but with the near-silent smoothness of an e-Golf when you don’t. I’m sure if you owned an SF90, you’d find yourself using Hybrid more than you ever imagined.
But not when you want it to feel like a Ferrari – or what you imagine the fastest Ferrari of all time should feel like. For that you need the upper two e-manettino modes. Both lock the twin-turbo V8 into play, but while Performance prioritises charging, Qualifying is all about maximum punch ⊲
IN EDRIVE, IT SOUNDS LIKE A CLANDESTINE FORKLIFT TRUCK TIME TRIAL IN AN AMAZON WAREHOUSE
YOU STILL HAVE ACCESS TO ALL 986BHP WHEN YOU NEED IT, BUT WITH THE NEAR SILENT SMOOTHNESS OF AN E GOLF WHEN YOU DON’T
at all times. The SF90’s V8 is based on the F8 Tributo’s, but stretched from 3.9 to 4.0 litres by opening up the bores, and there are new cylinder heads and intake and exhaust manifolds, plus electronically-controlled wastegates for the turbos. That lot pushes output up from the F8’s 710bhp to 769bhp, and lifts torque from 568lb ft to 590lb ft. Factor in 217bhp of e-power and you’re looking at 986bhp – or a nice, round 1000 metric ponies. (Ferrari states 133bhp and 63lb ft for each front motor and 201bhp/196lb ft for the rear motor, but isn’t going public with a total powertrain torque figure. And while the e-motors’ theoretical combined might is far higher, the battery limits the their total output to a nominal 217bhp.)
Ask for everything and you’ll accelerate more quickly than anyone ever has before in a production Ferrari with more than one seat. This is Chiron-level shove, the physics hurling you back in the seat and, as both axles dig in to send you 0-62mph in 2.5sec and 0-124mph in just 6.7, leaving you struggling to keep your hands stretched out ahead of you. An F8 needs 2.9sec and 7.8sec in the same tests, and while neither is as musical as Ferrari’s naturally-aspirated V12, the SF90 has a richer, more cultured tone. And a much crisper throttle. The electric motors don’t only add outright power, but their instant torque helps fill the bottom of the V8’s twist curve, and almost (but not completely) gets rid of the already minimal turbo lag.
Diving into some esses in the hills south of Maranello, it’s clear there’s less steering latency here, too. The now electrically-assisted rack is more rigidly mounted. It feels as high-geared as every mid-engined Ferrari of the past decade, but that more direct response, and what feels like a touch more weight, makes for a better sense of connection to the front tyres.
And those front tyres have more to do than ever before. Instead of falling back on the F8’s traction control and rear-diff collab to deal with your keen right foot, the SF90 uses its front driveshafts and torque-vectoring function to send almost every horse it can muster to the tarmac uninhibited. There’s no understeer to speak of, and much more traction than you could possibly expect.
A couple of hours in I’m impressed by its technical ability, and by the SF90’s ability to disguise its weight. But something’s niggling. Having always liked the distinctly rear-wheel-drive feel of Ferrari’s sports cars over rival Lamborghini’s four-wheel-drive alternatives, that very discreet but still palpable sensation of torque flowing through the front wheels as you climb on the power on the exit of a tight corner feels alien.
An hour later, having ripped the SF90 through some faster, flowing roads, we arrive at Ferrari’s Fiorano track ready to go faster still. Normal Ferrari launch protocol involves sitting alongside a test driver while he runs through a few hot laps, before taking the wheel yourself for three messier, distinctly cooler ones. But social-distancing rules means we can’t share a car, so we’ll have to follow the test driver in a second SF90.
This is no bad thing. First, it means we get six laps behind the wheel,
instead of three. And second, with a set of brake lights reminding me to lift, there’s less chance of me sailing into the gravel at the end of the start-finish straight, like I did last time I drove a 1000bhp Ferrari here…
That was entirely my fault: the LaFerrari was simply so much faster than any regular Ferrari road car that my existing braking reference points were rendered obsolete. But hang on – the SF90 is even faster in a straight line, but weighs over 500kg more. What could possibly go wrong?
Nothing, as it turns out, because 1000bhp or not, I can’t think of another mid-engined car that’s so unintimidating, so flattering. And flattery is exactly what it is. The SF90’s chassis works so subtly, helping mask your mistakes and boosting your confidence, it’s like watching a CGI blockbuster at the cinema – five minutes in you’re convinced it’s real and have completely stopped thinking about all the spectacularly complicated hardware and software interplay involved in making it happen.
As always, Race mode focuses on keeping things neat and working to make your tyres last. There’s no slip and for most of us non-pro drivers, this is probably the fastest way around the track. But it’s not the most fun.
A gentle interjection by the traction control on occasions when you think you could have gone faster – but probably couldn’t – will soon have you feeling curious, and feeling for that toggle. Now the real genius of the SF90 Stradale is revealed. Because while building a 1000bhp supercar is one thing, it’s something else altogether to build a 1000bhp supercar that anyone with a shred of driving talent can jump into and experience, enjoy and exploit up to and beyond the limit of tyres wider than this magazine. If you can drive a car, you can drive an SF90 like this, diving into corners on a trailing throttle to set the car up for the next straight, or smudging the rear tyres wide on the exit of a faster bend, knuckles still full of colour, not bleached the colour of bone.
Or you could drive it like this: throw a couple of cases in the nose (or you could if the electric motors hadn’t crucified the boot space) and take off across continental Europe for a week. Or just grind through city trac on your morning commute without wishing you’d taken the Range Rover instead. Because there’s so much more to the fastest, most powerful roadgoing Ferrari of all time than simply being the fastest, most powerful roadgoing Ferrari of all time.
Fans of old-school supercars might say that misses the very point of a supercar. These machines, they would argue, exist to deliver concentrated hits of adrenaline in short doses, to sound and look ridiculous, and hang the rest.
And if that’s what you’re after, perhaps you’d be better off with a Lamborghini Aventador SVJ, one of the few other exotics available at this price point. You get the looks, that majestic V12 noise, the trick doors, carbon chassis bragging rights and none of the extra weight and complexity of a hybrid powertrain you probably don’t fancy anyway. It’s your traditional cartoon supercar, and there are definitely times when it would plaster a bigger smile on your face.
But not many. The surprising thing about the SF90 is the awe-inspiring breadth of its ability. The single best thing about it – and there are many – is that the car’s ability doesn’t come at the expense of its capacity to involve and entertain. Like it or not, hybrid supercars are the future. And if they’re going to look and feel like this, we’re not going to spend too much time bemoaning a lost past.
IF YOU CAN DRIVE, YOU CAN DRIVE AN SF90 LIKE THIS, SMUDGING THE REAR TYRES WIDE ON EXIT