Technology
FEW CARS SUM-UP FERRARI’S APPROACH TO TECHNOLOGY BETTER THAN THE F40
IT’S A LOT of people’s favourite Ferrari, the F40. Treads a fine line between trad and modern. Light, aerodynamic, powerful (of course) and an analogue driving experience even though, in terms of construction and motive force, the F40 was pushing the boat out a bit by Ferrari standards.
You see, Ferrari had rarely been a technical trailblazer. Enzo’s cars won races because they lasted the course. His attitude? Trust experience more than experimentation. The race cars were all that mattered; famously, road cars sold only to fund the Scuderia. And although that initial 125 S first raced as far back as 1947, you can take the 250 Testa Rossa and GTO as metaphors for almost everything Ferrari stood for in its first couple of decades: a V12 at the front, a live axle at the back, and a tubular chassis stringing the whole thing together.
Race regs led the thinking but Enzo was no Colin Chapman. Rather than push the rules, he put reliability first. After all, how could you win if you couldn’t finish?
Ferrari’s first mid-mounted engine turned up in the 156 F1 car of 1961, a 1.5-litre V6 that was largely conventional: two camshafts, two valves per cylinder, Weber carbs in pairs or threes – yet 190-200bhp at a screaming 10,000rpm! The 206 Dino followed seven years later as Ferrari’s first mid-engined road car, while the 365 GT4 BB (the Boxer) was its first mid-engined supercar, arriving in 1973 – just as the seven-year career of Lamborghini’s Miura came to an end. Enzo might eventually have followed fashion, but he rarely set a trend.
So let’s turn our attention back to the F40. While this aero-savvy, ultra-lightweight, twinturbocharged, mid-engined, composite-bodied hypercar offered nothing that hadn’t been proven elsewhere, it was, by Ferrari standards, a technological tour de force, employing so many tricks the Scuderia had learnt at the pointy end of racing – befitting a road car built to celebrate the company’s own 40th anniversary. It was the last Ferrari completed under Enzo’s reign. And it was the first production Ferrari to claim 200mph.
Aerodynamics played an important role, with a partial undertray to smooth airflow beneath the radiator, and a second with diffusers behind the engine, though the engine bay was not sealed, keeping it cool. Lift was controlled by the front spoiler and rear wing.
Still, despite the Kevlar and carbonfibre, the flat-crank V8 with its paired IHI turbochargers, and the stated remit of trumping the übercomplex four-wheel-drive Porsche 959, the F40 was also remarkable for what it didn’t have. No ABS, no traction control, no power steering, no airbags, no brake servo. Not even any internal doorhandles, simply a couple of pullcords. So it weighed a scant 1104kg, which sounds far more Hethel than Maranello.
The F40 was one of the most vivid driving machines ever – just ask its A-list racing-driver owners: Mansell, Prost, Arnoux, Tambay… ‘The greatest Ferrari road car ever?’ questioned John Simister, rhetorically, in Octane 103. ‘Probably, with familiarity; it’s certainly the most savage, visceral, tactile and challenging.’
A decade later (another anniversary, don’t forget) came the F50, with its never-to-berepeated combination of a 750bhp naturally aspirated V12 and a gated manual gearbox. And you can read about the cutting-edge Enzo elsewhere in these pages, which traded the F40’s analogue purity for a robotised manual transmission and sophisticated electronic chassis reins.
Today even Ferrari’s ‘starter’ supercar packs every conceivable piece of technology. In the words of Octane’s sister magazine Evo: ‘Thanks to Ferrari’s wondrous grip of race-inspired traction control systems, there has never been a friendlier 661bhp car on the limit.’ 661bhp! A pair of turbos on the 488 GTB’s V8 are responsible for that – because that V8, in common with so many engines today, features forced induction in place of swept volume: only 3.9 litres versus the 4.5 of its 458 predecessor’s.
Turbocharged Ferraris are nothing new. The 1984 288 GTO was Ferrari’s first force-fed road car, and it debuted its first turbocharged F1 car in 1981. Even downsizing is a familiar tale. The Millechili (‘thousand kilo’) concept of 2007 showcased an eco-minded hybrid hypercar that would ultimately come to fruition in 2013 as the LaFerrari: the Prancing Horse’s current definitive (and therefore its ‘ultimate’) road car. An initial 500 were built, followed by 209 open-top Apertas, the last nine of which are being released during this year’s 70th anniversary celebrations.
Like the McLaren P1 and the Porsche 918 Spyder it’s a hybrid that packs significant petrol power, in this case a 789bhp 6.3-litre naturally aspirated V12 twinned with a racebred 161bhp KERS motor that fills the gaps in the torque band and helps it to 62mph from rest in under 3.0 seconds and on to 217mph flat out. Clever, as it should be for £1.2 million.
But it’s not my favourite piece of Ferrari tech. No, that accolade goes to the passive aerodynamics of the 458 Italia. Two fins either side of the front grille deform at speed, partially blocking the grille needed to cool the frontmounted radiators at low speeds and directing the air around the car, reducing the drag coefficient. Bendy plastic, no motorised wings. Now that’s clever.