FERRARI SF90
To celebrate Ferrari Racing’s 90th birthday, the company has given us a 1,000hp present – the SF90 Stradale. The age of the hybrid series production Ferrari is here
Thought turboed Prancing Horses were controversial? Look away now – Ferrari’s only gone and made a hybrid
Tempting, isn’t it, to dive straight into this new thousandhorsepower Ferrari SF 90 Stradale, submerging ourselves in the numbers and shapes and engineering? But hold on. Let’s first stand back for a moment, cast our eyes to the horizon and see where it fits into the landscape. A supercar landscape of more mountainous peaks and staggering vistas than we’ve ever visited before. Everywhere you look, something new rises before us.
Ferrari is having an epic year. It replaced the 488 with the F8 Tributo just a few months ago – in fact, the first of those haven’t even reached their buyers, and we haven’t tested one. Yet the Tributo’s 710bhp is now, we find, just the baseline. The SF90 is a production car, not one of Ferrari’s limited-edition hypercar series. It’s got as much power as a LaFerrari or a Porsche 918, but it doesn’t need one of those mysterious ‘friend of the brand’ handshakes or an unobtanium loyalty card just to get the invitation to buy.
Its colossal output puts it in the power ballpark of the Aston Martin Valkyrie and AMG One and some of the Koenigseggs. They’re about five times the price of this Ferrari, which, we’re hearing is somewhere around £400,000. The SF90 seems to have created a new slot: in power it’s north of the supercars, but in price it lies comfortably to the south of the limited-edition hypercars.
Here’s where the landscape is creating its new volcanoes before our very eyes, because this Ferrari isn’t actually alone; Aston Martin will end up somewhere in this territory with the AM-RB 003 turbo-V6 hybrid. We know, because people inside tell us, that Maranello and Gaydon are eyeballing each other with the intensity of hawks. That’s the power politics of car businesses wanting to gorge themselves on the world’s ever-growing population of billionaires.
“ITS COLOSSAL OUTPUT PUTS IT IN THE BALLPARK OF THE ASTON VALKYRIE AND AMG ONE”
“THE COCKPIT HAS MOVED FORWARD, THE OVERHANGS ARE SHORTENED, THE SILHOUETTE OF THE TAIL HAS RISEN”
Right then, deep breath. Let’s dive into the SF90’s details. Gorgeous, isn’t it? Ever since the little 308 GTB, the first of the V8 mid-engined two-seat Ferraris, they’ve had a certain recognisable proportion. Not this time. The cockpit has moved forward, the overhangs are shortened, the silhouette of the tail has risen even as the height of the engine below it has dropped. The rationale is, of course, aerodynamics, but the emotional effect is knee-trembling.
The twin-turbo V8 is a further development of the one in the F8 Tributo. Which itself is the same as 488 Pista’s. Now, I’m thinking back to the time I drove the Pista and trying to figure out how it could be ‘further developed’. It felt like some kind of historic pinnacle. Not to these guys, though. It’s now been bored out from 3.9 to 4.0 litres, and gotten a new induction and light Inconel exhaust system. The turbos are modified and injection pressure raised. The new parts are shaped to drop the centre of gravity too.
Result is a staggering 195 horses per litre, for a total of 780. Breathtaking. But not, you will have noticed, actually 1,000. Nope, to get to the full total, the SF90 also has three electric motors. One rotates with the crankshaft like a Formula One MGU-K. Another pair drives each of the front wheels. So, yes, the SF90 is 4WD, and it has torque vectoring to help you through corners.
Those electric motors add, Ferrari says, another 220 horsepower, arriving at our four-figure total. Now two ‘buts’. The first is insignificant – it’s metric horsepower, or CV, so it’s actually 986bhp
(as the Veyron was, to the pedantic). But I defy you to feel 1.4 per cent. More significant is that the motors on the front wheels will, in effect, over-rev and deliver no power at very high speed, making the car rear-drive only. It’s the same in all the cars that use front-drive motors: NSX, i8, 918. The SF90’s top speed is 212mph – if it had the whole stated power available, it’d surely go faster.
I don’t care. A high top speed is meaningless in the real world. Scratch that – it’s damaging, because it demands certain components to be modified in a way that make things worse at lower speed. I don’t want to do the 250mph that 1,000bhp promises me. I do want to catapult out of corners with some hope of safely deploying those bhp.
So the front motors can operate independently of each other. If your line is running wide, the outer one will draw you inward, and vice versa if you’re on the way to a spin. If you’re aiming straight, they’ll both give their all. That’s how come it’ll do 0–62mph in 2.5 seconds and 0–125mph in 6.7, up there with LaFerrari. And yes, it’ll also lap Fiorano in shorter order than the six year-old hypercar, at 1min 19secs. Of course, Ferrari has employed for the SF90 every one of the voodoo electronic systems that make the Pista such a vibrant, responsive and, heck, driftworthy track machine. Then it’s added this extra measure of front torquery-sorcery.
The gearbox, by the way, is entirely new, and has an extra gear – now eight – but is lighter than the old one, partly because there’s no reverse. This isn’t because Ferrari sends a white-gloved factotum to push you every time you want to go back. The SF90 simply uses its electric motors for that job.
Indeed, it’ll operate on those front motors alone for up to 15 miles if you’ve plugged in and fully charged. That’s the eDrive mode, and the parents of nearby sleeping babies will thank you. The next notch is Hybrid, when the engine cuts in and out, in pursuit of economy with performance. All modes use blended regenerative braking, naturally. Then, Performance. Does what it says, and the engine stays on, but the power is managed to make sure the battery doesn’t deplete far. So you can go like that all day. Finally, Qualify, where the thing will deploy all the power whenever you ask, even if it means draining the battery and finding a slight tail-off when that occurs.
Of course, there is weight in these motors, and in the 7.9kWh battery, and the power electronics and the cooling for it all. Dry weight is 1,570kg, and that’s with the Assetto Fiorano pack fitted, which saves 30kg. Let’s say 1,650-odd at the kerb. About the same as a 918, despite having turbos, and twin instead of single front motor/ gearboxes. It’s also a mostly aluminium tub, not carbon fibre, although carbon fibre is used for the engine bulkhead. It’s a new structure, not borrowed from the F8. It has to be, to make room for the hybrid systems, the new aerodynamics and the fresh proportions.
They call it a fighter-jet style cockpit. Of course they do. Honda said the same of the first NSX. Can we quit with the killing-machine analogies? But yes, this enigmatically gloss-black bubble is mounted well forward, and it’s narrow so as to present as little of itself to the air as possible. Trailing obliquely behind it are a pair of flying buttresses above the engine’s greedy air intakes. The engine itself, by being mounted lower, doesn’t only benefit the centre of gravity, but also the aerodynamics over the rear deck. Here’s why. Between the tail-lights, air emerges from under the fixed section of the rear wing. Well, normally it does. But in corners or braking, electric actuators rapidly lower the forward section of that wing. That staunches the flow underneath, and instead creates a new highdownforce Gurney flap.
Out front, radiators at either side manage engine coolant, and the central one does the motors and high-voltage electronics. Above the bumper, that indented step compresses the flow, working with the front diffusers to create downforce at the nose. The headlights can be slim because they’re all-LED, and the slit-intakes below them feed the brakes, which themselves have calipers actually shaped to improve their cooling airflow.
Look into the wheels and you see little helical bumps on the rims themselves. They’re pretty but they do more: drawing air out of the arches, which reduces lift, but also shaping this flow so it attaches neatly to the side of the car, cutting turbulent drag. The driver’s heels are 15mm higher than in the other Ferraris, because the floor is stepped upward at the front, improving the effect of the vortex generators mounted there. Their job is to disturb the local boundary layer and delay airflow separation, further improving front downforce to match the rear.
All of which aerodynamic work means an equivalent of 390kg extra downward push on the tyres at 155mph compared with the static weight. Which is pretty huge, folks.
Recent Ferraris all have a control and switch layout that is – let’s be polite – distinctly idiosyncratic. Maybe it’s a safety thing: if you can read the speedo you’re not going too fast. If you can make out the satnav, you’ve already stopped at the junction. Anyway, the SF90 Stradale has a new set-up, and the company says it’ll influence the whole future range. The main instrument pod is a 16in curvedglass configurable screen. Lots of digital wow. There’s also a touchpad on the steering wheel, a trick even Mercedes can’t make work properly, so let’s see how Ferrari does. Best news, perhaps, is that a head-up display is part of the system. One amusing and sentimental touch is the transmission selector switches, which resemble a tiny version of the old open-gate manual gearshift.
The Assetto Fiorano optional package earns its 30kg weight saving by using titanium springs and exhaust and carbon-fibre panels for the doors. It also has upgraded dampers and trackfocused tyres. Like anyone’s going to buy the base-model thousandhorsepower Ferrari. They’ll all get the package, and revert to having standard tyres if they live where it rains.
Perhaps as a way to PR its way into a hybrid future, with the SF90 Stradale, Ferrari is keener than ever to emphasise that principles it learns on track actually feed into the road cars. SF90 is the name of this year’s F1 car, named in honour of the team’s anniversary year. Stradale means road, even if, of course, this isn’t a road-going racecar. That’d be a frightful nuisance. Whereas this sounds like a rather usable thousand horsepower. Can’t believe I just typed that.
“MAYBE IT’S A SAFETY THING: IF YOU CAN READ THE SPEEDO, YOU’RE NOT GOING TOO FAST”