This is the Ferrari F12tdf, a faster, lighter and more
powerful special edition of the Ferrari F12 Berlinetta.
Ferrari says the car has been created in homage to the legendary Tour de France road races, which it dominated in the 1950s and 1960s with the likes of the 1956 250 GT Berlinetta.
Ferrari says the car has been created in homage to the legendary Tour de France road races, which it dominated in the 1950s and 1960s with the likes of the 1956 250 GT Berlinetta.
The F12tdf is described as “the ultimate expression of the concept of an extreme road car that is equally at home on the track”. Just 799 examples will be built.
The car keeps the same 6.3-litre naturally aspirated V12 engine as the regular F12 Berlinetta, but power has been boosted from 730bhp to 770bhp at 8500rpm, while torque has increased from 509lb ft to 520lb ft at 6750rpm. But the changes don't stop there.
Find out what they've done to make the incredible Ferrari F12 even better - and join Matt Prior on board as he discovers what it's like to drive.
Un mostro? Ferrari’s F12 is
not a car that ever struck me as wanting for power. It really doesn’t feel like
it needs more nor, at least without significant modification, should it be
given it. But here we are: the Ferrari F12tdf, a special version of the F12,
limited in production but unlimited in ambition.
It’s called F12tdf to reference the old Tour de France road
race, which Ferraris won quite a few times, but only ‘F12tdf’ in name and not
actually ‘F12 Tour de France’. The two-wheeled, pedal-powered Tour de France
owns the Tour de France moniker, so only the Tour de France can actually say
Tour de France.
Follow?
Anyway, the F12tdf it is, and it gets lots more power than
an F12, and, thankfully, plenty of other modifications to go with it. Ferrari’s
special 12-cylinder car program has in the past provided us with the 599 GTO,
of which 599 were made.
Ferrari suggests the 799 tdfs that will roll away from
Maranello will be just as extreme, providing a front-engine Ferrari V12 with
hitherto unmatched levels of agility. There are several ways you can make a car
feel more agile, and Ferrari has done all of them.
One is adding more poke: so the F12tdf gets 770bhp instead
of 730bhp, thanks mostly to an easier-breathing inlet on the 6.3-litre engine
and race-derived mechanical rather than hydraulic tappets, which are noisier
but lighter and allow a higher rev limit – some 8900rpm.
Another method is to reduce weight, so the F12tdf is 110kg
lighter than the F12, thanks to the removal of much of the interior (Alcantara
and carbonfibre replaces leather and aluminum), and the replacement of much of
the aluminum bits on the outside with carbonfibre.
But the easiest way to introduce agility to a car is simply
to fit it with massive front tires. At the start of the development process,
Ferrari did just that - fitting 315-section F12 rear wheels to the front, and
then even slick tires to the front, to see what the result was like.
Hilarious but perilously unstable is the short of it, which
meant Ferrari couldn’t just leave it like that. And here its marketing men
rather like to use an aerospace analogy: in the same way that a modern fighter
jet is designed to be inherently unstable so that it’s incredibly agile, so too
was the F12tdf.
And where a modern fighter uses electronic control systems
to make it flyable, Ferrari uses active rear steering to make the F12tdf drive
able again. They call the system a ‘virtual short wheelbase’, or ‘passo corto
virtuale’ to be precise, although it’s not strictly accurate in either
language; it’s the wider front tires, 285 section rather than 255s, that
increase the agility and make the car feel like it’s shorter.
The ZF rear steer system, which weighs around 5kg, can add
up to a degree of toe in or out thanks to electromechanical actuators acting on
a toe link, and almost always turns in the same direction as the fronts (except
at maneuvering speeds), is used to put stability back in.
In effect, that lengthens rather than shortens the wheelbase
again, but semantics aside, the aerospace analogy isn’t unfounded. Either way,
Ferrari likes the system so much it’ll use it again in future. So significant
are these things that beyond them the changes are mere details.
The aerodynamics are improved – the car’s a little longer as
a result, while the rear track is wider because of the active toe changes. Gear
ratios are 5-6% shorter, enough to reduce the 0-62mph time to 2.9sec, and
spring rates are stiffer, by 20% – a difference you’ll feel “within a metre”.
The price, if you’ve been invited to buy an F12tdf – and
you’ll own at least five other Ferraris and be known by the company “very well”
if you have – is £339,000.
What's it like?:
Intriguing. And if that isn’t the word as immediately
positive as you’d expect about a car from a manufacturer that can do scarcely
little wrong at the moment, I share your surprise.
Ferrari admits that its special V12 models aren’t simple to
jump into and drive quickly – they’re not like the standard mid-engine V8s –
and the F12tdf takes some learning before you feel completely comfortable with
it on a circuit. I’ll come back to that.
Because on the road, of course, dynamic extremes aren’t such
a bother. Yes, you do notice the firmness of the ride and the fact that if you
flick the dampers to ‘bumpy road’ mode there’s seemingly less of a difference
than in a standard Ferrari. It’s always firm: not crashy, but you know what’s
beneath you.
The F12tdf retains the F12’s two-turn lock-to-lock steering
rack, but because of the wider front tires and stiffer suspension, it feels
more connected and responsive than a regular F12. So in many ways it’s easier
to drive; out in the hillside roads around Maranello the F12tdf steers with
ease and precision; it’s a big car but one that’s easy to place.
And it has an utterly magnificent powertrain. Untroubled by
turbochargers yet still developing 80% of the engine’s torque from 2000rpm, its
response is fantastic, it makes a glorious noise like an F1 car of old and the
seven-speed dual-clutch automatic gearbox has had a few tweaks to clean up and
shorten the shift times.
At the top end of the rev range the response is on occasion
too sharp – even Ferrari’s test drivers think as much – but such is the
significance of the 'tdf' name and the program that the engineers and marketers
want the F12tdf to feel like there’s some racing car in it. Quite a few racing
drivers would be delighted to find their race cars had a powertrain as strong
and responsive as this. It is phenomenal.
It’s on a circuit, though, nearer the car’s limits, where
the idiosyncrasies of the F12tdf’s handling, and the response of the engine,
come further into consideration.
In most front-engine, rear-driven cars, you know what you’re
going to get on a track. You have to settle the nose on approach to a bend,
probably trail the brakes slightly to reduce understeer, which in turn can
unsettle the rear, and then you drive through nicely under power, applying just
the amount you want in order to adjust the attitude of the car. An Aston Martin
V12 Vantage, for example, is as simple as they get.
The F12tdf isn’t quite like that. Partly that’s because
there’s not really any understeer to drive around in the first place. The
additional front tire width makes it feel hyper-agile, so in faster corners it
darts for the apex, but then, when you expect the rear to become unsettled
because of the speed with which the nose has dived into a bend, the active rear
steer intervenes and makes the back end more stable, keeping the rear trimmed
to the same apex as the fronts at a speed a car without the system fitted just
couldn’t match.
Mind you, with any significant application of throttle – and
more or less any throttle application is significant in a car with this power
and response – it will still light up the rears, at which point the increased
speed at which you’re travelling, the electric response of the engine and
whatever the rear is up to conspire to make it feel not altogether
natural.
With more familiarity, you learn to anticipate the F12tdf’s
characteristics, drive with lighter, more finger tippy touches and smaller
inputs, and then it becomes a deeply rewarding thing. But it’s not a car – like
the docile 488 GTB is – that you can just enjoy easily.
source: http://www.autospies.com/news/DRIVEN-VIDEO-So-What-Is-The-All-New-Ferrari-F12tdf-REALLY-Like-To-Drive-86902/
by agent00r
http://www.autocar.co.uk/car-review/ferrari/f12-berlinetta/first-drives/2015-ferrari-f12tdf-review
by Matt Prior
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