Ferrari 488 GTB
Review
Maranello, Italy
You just knew that when Ferrari finally decided to put turbochargers in its
mainstay V8 sports car, they were going to deliver something fiendishly fast.
And they have. It’s no longer Gallardo/911 Turbo-fast, like the 458 was. It’s
now Aventador fast. At 458 money.
At least half of the 200km of launch roads are lumpy, broken, crumbling and
wobble erratically through the Appenine mountains. Short straights are
interrupted by blind, unpredictably-cambered bends that haven’t well survived
the ravages of loneliness, icy winters and the Mille Miglia.
It’s the sort of road most sane car companies would think
twice about using for a new, brisk crossover SUV.
Instead of that, our ride is wearing the badge that so many
fast car lovers assume to be the pinnacle of brilliantly polished,
highly-strung fragility.
But there’s nothing highly strung about the 488 GTB. Its
engine might have gone from naturally aspirated and 4.5 litres to
twin-turbocharged and 3.9 litres, and that pair of high-tech, ground breaking
IHI force feeders is grabbing all the headlines.
And on these roads, there’s nothing fragile about it,
either. It’s the car’s ability to cope with brutality attacking it from beneath
and still use every scrap of its 492kW of power that stands out. Not just that
it has 492kW of power and is a car so fast that Italy provided almost no
opportunities to get to full throttle in the first two gears.
And, when you pound the throttle from mid-revs in third
gear, Ferrari’s latest V8 coupe attacks the horizon so hard that you can feel
the skin on your face move back.
That should be a surprise, in plenty of ways. It’s pitched
against Lamborghini’s naturally-aspirated V10, but makes a mockery of that
because it smashes from zero to 200km/h not just faster than the Huracan and
not just faster than the V12 Aventador. Its 8.3 seconds of fury and noise make
it faster than the lightweight, track-pack beast of an Aventador SV.
Sure, being rear-drive limits its ability to get everything
out of the V8 to 100km/h (though you’d have to be petty to quibble about its
3.0-second attack), but it gets past this to rip through the quarter-mile in
10.45 seconds and goes on beyond 330km/h.
Abilities like these instantly dissuade you from considering
the switch to turbochargers as a negative, even if the 458, the last of the
atmo breed, was the epitome of high-revving, naturally-aspirated supercar
perfection. It wasn’t that long ago that we were calling Ferrari’s hard-core
458 Speciale the best sports car in the world, and one of the most complete
cars we’d ever driven.
The
turbocharged 488 GTB is four-tenths
faster to 100km/h than that the 458 and more than two seconds quicker
to 200km/h. Or, put another way, it’s 20 per cent quicker. Even for the most
loyal of atmo fans, that’s going to be the right price to switch. I loved this
one, Mr Ferrari, but, well, you mount quite the argument.
It doesn’t reach its power peak right at the tip of its
engine range, at 9000rpm, anymore. Instead, it hits the peak at 6200rpm and
holds it to 8000, which is phenomenally high for a turbo V8.
There’s 760Nm of torque, too, but you have to have the
seven-speed dual-clutch transmission in seventh gear before Ferrari will let
you have it. Ferrari’s engineers were paranoid about it feeling and sounding
like a turbo-diesel.
“It’s not our philosophy to have one or two or three gears
of overdrive. We want to have short gears to manage the bends,” Ferrari’s
engineers argued.
“We limit the torque in the first three gears. We want a
certain slope of the torque and achieve the maximum peak of torque as far up as
we can in revs, so you get 710Nm at 6500rpm.
“It’s limited but not by much. We always want you to enjoy
the vehicle and exploit the full range of the vehicle and push [it] to the rev
limiter, with the noise of the intake to give you the feeling of a car that
always wants to push.”
Not only does Ferrari fiddle the torque for each gear, but
every gear has a completely different torque curve, getting a longer peak with
each rising gear number.
Everything in the engine has been attacked so that it spins
freer and faster, including the pistons, the crankshaft, the valvetrain and the
new twin-scroll turbochargers themselves.
Weighing 8kg each, the ball-bearing turbos even use a
titanium-aluminium compressor wheel to speed up response, which Ferrari insists
is every bit as quick as the atmo 458 could manage and is far quicker than
rival turbo motors.
Ferrari insists it is 85 per cent new compared to the 458,
but there are some significant bits pulled from the parts bin. It carries the
steering rack out of the 458 Speciale (and, seriously, why on earth not?) and
also the same magnetically-changeable dampers, while the braking system has
been plucked from the mega-dollar
LaFerrari.
The result is a genuine supercar that is also, if anything,
an easier car to drive very, very quickly on both the road and the track. It’s
almost impossible to throw it away on the track, even when you flick the
steering wheel’s switch to its Race mode and then, again, when you flick it
further around to get it into crazy Tokyo-drift-king mode.
The SSC2, which is the side-slip control, has been further
developed and now, instead of figuring out the throttle opening for you and working
the electronically-variable differential to do the trickiest sliding work for
you, it now fiddles with the damper rates as well. There’s almost nothing it
won’t do to make you faster, and safer.
It’s almost at the point where there’s nothing – nothing –
frightening about pushing the 488 GTB to its handling limits.
The steering is taut, responsive and carries the same
perfectly-measured weight as the 458 Speciale, and the grip envelope might be
so ridiculously high compared to mere mortal cars, but it’s easy to get to.
It’s easy, too, to get beyond and bringing it back again makes amateurs look
like competition-standard operators.
That’s a strange thing to say with limits as high as these,
but it’s nonetheless true. The 488 GTB is certainly the easiest mid-engined
Ferrari (and maybe even the easiest mid-engined car of all time) to extract
everything from.
The damping will go largely unsung in most publications, but
it’s vying with the turbo V8 to be the most outstanding part of the car. You
can adjust it, via a button on the steering wheel, to cope with bumpier roads,
but we’d been belting it across the Futa Pass for a long time before we figured
that out. And it hadn’t been unsettled in any way whatsoever up to then.
It’s not just outright grip, but how it can get so much
power down, so easily and comfortably in the face of such horrors beneath it.
You can stand on the throttle on a light-footed direction change and the
skid-control light will flash, but you’ll barely notice a thing from the coupe as
its systems sort it all out for you to keep you safe and give you more and more
speed.
It helps that the carbon-ceramic anchors are stupendous and
deliver the kind of power you only usually have under your foot on a
competition car. We got data logging that showed it pulling 1.96 g under brakes
at Fiorano, and doing it repeatedly, without a trace of fade and with plenty of
feedback and adjustability through the pedal.
It corners flatter than the 458, so don’t for a second think
it’s because it’s been softened off. It’s just so comprehensively good below
decks that it almost doesn’t feel mid-engined. All the areas where mid-engined
cars can get tricky? Yeah, the 488 GTB doesn’t have any of those.
Don’t for a second think it’s been built to favour the road
over the track, either. It’s two full seconds quicker around Fiorano than the
458. Actually, it’s quicker than the Enzo around Ferrari’s own test track.
The high-speed stuff is helped along by genuine downforce
(104kg across the car at 200km/h) from the active aerodynamics, the low speed
is helped by the massive amounts of air being fed into its intercoolers and by
the time it doesn’t spend changing gears.
It’s impressive in other areas, too. The dashboard looks
similar, but it’s all new, with greater focus on the driver. The satellite
navigation unit is still awkwardly clunky (at least it was in Italy) and easily
disoriented, but the glovebox is bigger than a lot of sedans and the
front-mounted boot is fortnight-holiday large now. Plus there are three storage
bins in the centre console that are useful for keys, water bottles, phones and
the like.
But it’s not perfect. The visuals have lost the remarkable,
precise cleanliness of the 458 and there are one or two angles where the chunk
carved out for the engine’s air inlet looks out of proportion. But turbo
engines need more cooling, plus the car now has genuine downforce, so there are
prices people should be prepared to pay, and that’s one of them.
The other is the noise. Ferrari argued hard that they’d spend
a lot of time on perfecting the engine note to make the turbo motor sound like
a real Ferrari.
It sounds great. It really does, especially at either end of
its range. It fires up deep and loud and gruff and it sings nicely and proudly
at higher revs. But there’s a big chunk in the middle where it’s not as sweet
as we had hoped – though (and this is critically important) that’s measuring it
against the frenetically glorious symphony that was the 458 engine.
Again, though, that’s a price most people will be
deliriously chuffed to pay to get the added pace, power and flexibility of the
488 GTB.
After all, when it arrives in Australia in December, there
won’t be many other cars in this class that will give so much of themselves to
make you look like a superstar every time you point it at a corner.
And surely feeling and looking like a superstar is the whole
point of buying a supercar?
2015 Ferrari 488 GTB pricing and specifications:
Price: Expect a few per cent more than current
Engine: 3.9-litre, twin-turbocharged V8 petrol
Output: 492kW/760Nm
Transmission: Seven-speed dual-clutch
Fuel: 11.4 litres/100km
CO2: 260 g/km
source: http://www.motoring.com.au/reviews/2015/prestige-and-luxury/ferrari/488-gtb/ferrari-488-gtb-2015-review-51995
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