Of course, I wouldn’t be writing this had they not been perfectly benign. We find John and all get out of our cars. They take the usual selfies while asking the usual questions about the car. How fast – how powerful – how much? Wow, che bella… That’s what it does to people. A supercar isn’t a selfish indulgence for the driver, but a joy to be shared. Down the autostrada yesterday, families with over-excited kids would draw alongside, wind down their windows, urge me to give the V8 a bit of a tickle, grab a phone shot. (I was that kid myself once. In the early Eighties I grabbed a shot on print film of a certain Porsche just because I recognised its manufacturer-owned registration from car magazines: THE 928S.)
Arrivederci to my brand-new friends. I press the Ferrari’s starter again. Now, if this had been the 458 or its predecessors, I’d have winced, concerned about shattering the peaceful cemetery walls. Of waking the dead. But not this time. Because this is the 488, the new-age twin-turbo V8. It hums into life, subdued as a priest reciting the liturgy of committal.
Oh, how we love the 488. It might be quiet at idle, and civil at moderate speed, but that deceives. At full noise, it’s a ferociously powerful thing, fast enough to bamboozle and corrupt you, to bend your perceptions. Having chosen the 488 as our Supercar of the Year, we wanted a proper road trip. Scouring maps of southern Italy for driver-centric roads and scenery, I came across a town called Potenza.
Its tourist-office claim is to be Italy’s highest-altitude regional capital. That’s not what caught my eye. Potenza in Italian translates as ‘power’ in English. We all love a bad pun, so a “power trip” was hatched. South from Rome and on to Naples and Salerno, even initially past Potenza itself to the forested hills and jagged mounts beyond. City, autostrada, fast sweeping A-road, valleys and mountainous passes, an entire five-course, 1,000km, driver’s buffet.
Just as well, because the 488 is not a car that you get to know at the first blush. For a start, there’s the sheer speed of the thing, which needs acclimatisation like high-altitude training does. Beyond that, it takes time and no little mental effort to prise open the enigma of the engine’s delivery.
Ferrari’s stated aim was to build a turbo engine that feels like a naturally aspirated engine. Huh? As maker of undoubtedly the world’s sharpest and most exciting naturally aspirated engines, why not just build another of those? You know the answer: the thicket of global fuel-consumption rules. But also, the turbos gave Ferrari the chance to serve up much more power and very much more torque in an overall engine package that’s physically smaller, lower and slightly lighter than before. And while there might be people in the supercar-buying community who say their cars have enough power, a penny to a pound says if they were offered more they’d fail miserably to resist the temptation.
If you think I’m having to labour to explain it, try driving it. Yes, the engine behaves differently in every gear (as, of course, do some of the new hybrid cars including the 918 and i8, which have multi-geared combustion engines and single-gear electric motors). I’m finding myself short-shifting out of the lower gears, because with each new ratio the engine finds extra potential. It’s slightly baffling at first, and in the early hours with the car I’m cursing myself for not getting the best from it. But eventually it becomes relaxing: when there’s always more performance than you can use, why fret you’ve not done what’s needed to have available far more than enough?
In top gear, the 488 is just immense. Floor it on a motorway, and the boost builds like some kind of gravitational discontinuity. In that regime, it makes even a McLaren 675LT seem limp. The puffers hiss, the exhaust roars, and the speedo goes mildly berserk. This is turbocharging in its absolute pomp.
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