It boasts the most extreme performance ever achieved by a Ferrari production car and features the most advanced and innovative technical solutions which will, in the future, filter down to the rest of the Ferrari range.
The LaFerrari represents Ferrari’s most ambitious project yet to push the boundaries of technology on a road car, drawing together the finest expression of the marque’s technical capabilities in both GT and Formula 1 engineering.
Engineering
and design in synergy
LaFerrari
was designed by the Ferrari Styling Centre which worked in synergy with
the engineering and development departments from the very start of the
model’s inception.The night I was scheduled to leave for Maranello, Italy, to drive the LaFerrari, Car and Driver hosted a party in New York for the annual auto show. The guests included three racing heroes you’d recognize from the Kodachromes: David Hobbs, Sam Posey, and Brian Redman. These gents hail from the golden age of motorsport, when every race weekend seemed to darken into an orgy of gore and fire.
I apologized in advance to Redman for having to leave the party early. I told him that duty called, and that I was off to drive this car, the latest in a line of rolling laboratory experiments stretching back through the Enzo, F50, F40, and 288 GTO. I also confessed that I was slightly terrified to tangle with the thing. He sized me up and said, “You should be.”
HY-KERS system
| Total maximum power | 963 CV |
| Total maximum torque | >900 Nm |
| V12 maximum power* | 800 CV @9000 rpm |
| Maximum revs | 9250 rpm |
| V12 maximum torque | 700 Nm @6750 rpm |
| Electric motor output | 120 Kw (163 CV) |
| CO2 emissions** | 330 g/km |
Performance
| Maximum speed | over 350 km/h |
| 0-100 km/h | <3 sec |
| 0-200 km/h | <7 sec |
| 0-300 km/h | 15 sec |
ICE
| Type | 65-deg. V12 |
| Bore and stroke | 94 x 752 mm |
| Total displacement | 6262 cc |
| Compression ratio | 13.5:1 |
| Specific power | 128 CV/l |
Dimensions
| Length | 4702 mm |
| Width | 1992 mm |
| Height | 1116 mm |
| Wheelbase | 2650 mm |
| Weight distribution | 41% fr, 59% r |
Gearbox
Suspension
| Front | double wishbones |
| Rear | multi-link |
Tyres(Pirelli P-Zero)
| Front | 265/30 - 19 |
| Rear | 345/30 - 20 |
Carbon ceramic brakes (Brembo)
| Front | 398 x 223 x 36 mm |
| Rear | 380 x 253 x 34 mm |
Electronic controls
| ESC | stability control |
| High perf ABS/EBD | Performance anti blockage system/electronic brake balance |
| EF1-Trac | F1 electronic traction control integrated with the hybrid system |
| E-Diff 3 | third generation electronic differential |
| SCM-E Frs | magnetorheological damping with twin solenoids (Al-Ni tube) |
| Aerodynamics | active |
NOTE
| * | with dynamic ram effect |
| ** | Undergoing homologation |
I’ve driven cars that have tried to kill me before, but none with such a
vast résumé of homicidal know-how. Some have threatened to slide off
the road without warning, some have tried to collapse my organs with
g-forces, and some have ached to impale me on their sharp interior
surfaces. This one does it all. There is a video of Kimi Räikkönen, Ferrari F1 driver and a racer of almost Mario Andretti–like versatility,
driving the LaFerrari (the TheFerrari?) at the brand’s Fiorano test
track. There are flames spitting out of the car’s exhaust pipes. There
are deafening shrieks. There is imminent loss of control at every
corner. And then, finally, a lurid, frame-filling spin onto the grass.
If Kimi couldn’t corral the surrealist bestiality packed into this car’s
short wheelbase, what hope did I, someone who has never even been to
Finland, really have?
The LaFerrari uses its stupid name as a feint, belittling a specification that is as serious as an Apollo mission. Its 950-hp hybrid powertrain shames Ferrari’s F14 T F1 car by maybe 200 horses (actual F1 power figures are undisclosed). Its center of gravity is 1.4 inches lower than the Enzo’s, and it uses a carbon-fiber tub baked in the same autoclaves as Ferrari’s F1 cars. At speed, its aerodynamics provide the car with one gorilla’s worth of downforce (800 pounds). The brakes are cross-drilled and vented carbon-ceramic rotors the size of crash cymbals.
There are more-powerful cars on sale. There are cars with more downforce and cars with even bigger and blacker brakes. But the LaFerrari represents a singularity. It is less a conventional supercar than a carefully orchestrated system of technologies resulting in something both brutally animalistic and mechanically pristine.
We are in Ferrari’s F1 shop, where Franco Cimatti, the head of road-car
development, is backdropped by four huge autoclaves, big
brewery-vat-looking things laid on their sides. This is where the LaFerrari’s carbon-fiber tub
gets baked, right alongside those of the racing cars. Cimatti, thin,
with close-cropped hair and wire-rimmed glasses, says: “If you get the
physics right, everything else falls into place. A low center of gravity
is key.”
He planned the car’s architecture around its seating position. His original idea was to lay the driver down into an almost F1-like recumbency: legs up and backrest at chaise angle. But he found that 32 degrees is as far as you can recline a non-F1–driving human before his front neck muscles start to compress and his breathing becomes strained. Still, Cimatti got the driver 2.4 inches lower than in the Enzo by easing him back a bit and removing the seat, separating the driver’s rear from the tub with just an Alcantara-swathed pad. Without a seat’s springs or compliance, there is no filter to muffle chassis feedback.
Without a seat, though, it would have been kind of awkward and somewhat humiliating to get in and out of the car. So Ferrari cut away the sills and integrated them into the batwings, hinging the now large and deep doors on the A-pillars and roof, endurance-car style. The arrowhead-shaped tub has the added effect of reducing frontal area for less drag; open those big portals and the exposed front wheels almost look as if they’re seceding from the body.
Part of the aero package is passive, too. There are channels in the shape that help air remain attached to the body while also funneling flow through the cooling system. And, indeed, the LaFerrari needs all the cooling it can get. Here are the main elements of the so-called HY-KERS (Hybrid Kinetic Energy Recovery System) powertrain: a 789-hp 6.3-liter V-12 with variable-length intake runners, a 13.5:1 compression ratio, and an Everestian 9250-rpm peak at redline; an oil-cooled 161-hp electric motor hung off the back of the seven-speed dual-clutch automatic; and a low-set, liquid-cooled lithium-ion battery pack that acts as a structural element aft of the passenger compartment.The basic slipperiness and lift inherent to the shape led to a dynamic-aero solution to keep the LaFerrari stuck to the road. All its wings and flaps are hidden when the car is parked, but they are the most obvious things about it in motion. Front and rear undercar panels continuously manage downforce by moving from a low-drag, or flat, position to a high-drag setting folded into the slipstream. And a wide fluke at the back constantly changes pitch and height, rising out from underneath the trailing edge of the engine cover. At 125 mph, downforce ranges from 200 pounds in the low-drag settings to 800 pounds with all the flaps and wings reaching away from the body, radically upping the car’s stability and adhesion limit.
Total system output is a claimed 950 horsepower, and it’s all orchestrated to highlight each element’s strength. It calls on the electric motor’s instantaneous response to provide a kind of boost, filling in the screaming V-12’s lower rev range. The result is a compound powertrain with shockingly smooth and immediate response; if you’re holding fourth gear and mash the throttle, you’ll swear from the kidney and lung compression that you were in second gear.
The car is technically a plug-in hybrid. There is not yet a pure-EV setting on the manettino steering-wheel switch, but later cars will offer drivers the guilt-assuaging luxury of purring up to five miles on battery juice alone.
The LaFerrari will have a limited run of 499 units, so it’s not a concept car. But it is highly conceptual: hybrid system for more torque, movable aerodynamic elements for elevated limits, and a driver sitting on the bottom of the tub for a more direct connection with the machine. It should not surprise anybody to learn that Cimatti, the car’s mastermind, builds his own mountain bikes that use the rear of the titanium frame as a spring element.
I first climbed into the car in the “Box,” Ferrari’s Formula 1 test and telemetry garage at Fiorano, located across the street from the factory. Inside, the car almost looks like a tactical aircraft. Everything you see is exposed carbon fiber with just a few Alcantara accents, and there are lots of pod-mounted buttons whose functions are almost entirely obscure. With the fullness of time, you learn the ways in which the menu buttons and four-position switches—one set at each of the driver’s hands—control the glass-cockpit instrumentation. But this is not recommended at speed.
Fire up the LaFerrari, and you can actually feel the barometric pressure in the garage change as the car clears its throat and then, at ignition, makes the whap of 100 pounds of nails hitting concrete. The driving position doesn’t feel that extreme, mostly because the car’s squared-off steering wheel is big and well placed, but also because a pull-lever by the seat bottom lets you slide the whole pedal set up to meet your legs.
I was told that I would get three laps—one warm-up, one hot, one cool-down—street value somewhere in the five figures. But it was hardly enough time to get comfortably up to speed in the car. What I interpreted was a kind of relentless brutality and directness. The powertrain responds like an electric motor while sounding like a big, brassy V-12. Somehow, the hybrid system preserves the engine’s inherent smoothness; it just adds more—more low-end torque, more linearity, more clearance to redline. You are never out of the power band. The part-throttle, on-off reflexes are hair-trigger. You have to adjust to all this, and once you do, no car will ever feel truly, head-hurtingly quick again.
I couldn’t hear the aero elements moving under the rawp of the engine, but I could feel their effects. The car is unerringly stable in a straight line under hard throttle, and braking zones feel usefully shortened, thanks to the big rear wing. In cornering, you have to be going fast enough to make the car stick. In a couple of tight turns, I jumped on the throttle too early and felt the back end come around, flushing my nervous system with adrenaline, making my fingers tingle. It’s hard not to worry about spinning the LaFerrari when you’ve seen an F1 driver do so, but it’s more likely that he had all the electronic traction helpers off, and not on their penultimate “CT off” manettino setting, which allows some sideslip before reining in the car. The application of this car to that track made the former seem big and hairy and the latter seem small and insanely technical. Then it was over.
Thankfully, we were also allowed some time with the car on the road. We took it up into the Apennine montane belt outside Maranello, where tight and undulating roads are cut into the hillsides. There, the car started to shrink. The power steering is odd in that it returns absolutely zero road feel; the electrically assisted system numbs out any hint of street surface, even big blemishes. But it is nevertheless some of the best steering I’ve ever encountered—direct, noiseless, and linear. The wheel’s failure to impart road texture almost doesn’t matter because all that info shoots up from the rest of the chassis like an electric shock. It’s akin to sitting on a motorcycle. Or, as Cimatti says, “In this car, you are the inertial mass.”
The car’s ride-and-handling balance favors both. It floats over bumps. Its suspension system is an evolution of the 458 Italia’s, with control arms in front and a thicket of links in back. What makes its over-the-road suppleness even more amazing is that it doesn’t have the 458’s real-time adjustable magnetorheological dampers. It just has these very cool, two-mode (normal and “bumpy road”) Öhlins coil-overs, which are expensive but not necessarily cutting edge. It feels softer, as if it’s running less spring rate, than the Italia.
On these rising, heavily kinked roads, the car shows off its abundant
front-end grip, as though it’s extending a fat, sharp-clawed paw toward
the corner’s apex. And turn-in is both immediate and crisp; the
LaFerrari pivots more than handles.
The brakes reveal a bit of a stepped transition from energy regeneration to friction as you modulate, but, hey, nothing’s perfect.
What Ferrari has created here is something as cerebral as it is brutal, the Hannibal Lecter of supercars, the Richard Sherman of . . . Sorry. I’m stretching.
Martin Mull once said that writing about music was like dancing about architecture. That there is no way to capture on paper a great performance’s sweep, its pulse, its emotional effect. We may have reached the point where cars are getting so outrageously fast and so deliriously powerful that their performance outstrips our ability to invent new ways of conveying it. In some ways, writing about the LaFerrari is like playing poker about salad. It’s something that can’t be bound by the page; it’s a full-body experience. And yes, Mr. Redman, I survived it.
The LaFerrari uses its stupid name as a feint, belittling a specification that is as serious as an Apollo mission. Its 950-hp hybrid powertrain shames Ferrari’s F14 T F1 car by maybe 200 horses (actual F1 power figures are undisclosed). Its center of gravity is 1.4 inches lower than the Enzo’s, and it uses a carbon-fiber tub baked in the same autoclaves as Ferrari’s F1 cars. At speed, its aerodynamics provide the car with one gorilla’s worth of downforce (800 pounds). The brakes are cross-drilled and vented carbon-ceramic rotors the size of crash cymbals.
There are more-powerful cars on sale. There are cars with more downforce and cars with even bigger and blacker brakes. But the LaFerrari represents a singularity. It is less a conventional supercar than a carefully orchestrated system of technologies resulting in something both brutally animalistic and mechanically pristine.
He planned the car’s architecture around its seating position. His original idea was to lay the driver down into an almost F1-like recumbency: legs up and backrest at chaise angle. But he found that 32 degrees is as far as you can recline a non-F1–driving human before his front neck muscles start to compress and his breathing becomes strained. Still, Cimatti got the driver 2.4 inches lower than in the Enzo by easing him back a bit and removing the seat, separating the driver’s rear from the tub with just an Alcantara-swathed pad. Without a seat’s springs or compliance, there is no filter to muffle chassis feedback.
Without a seat, though, it would have been kind of awkward and somewhat humiliating to get in and out of the car. So Ferrari cut away the sills and integrated them into the batwings, hinging the now large and deep doors on the A-pillars and roof, endurance-car style. The arrowhead-shaped tub has the added effect of reducing frontal area for less drag; open those big portals and the exposed front wheels almost look as if they’re seceding from the body.
Part of the aero package is passive, too. There are channels in the shape that help air remain attached to the body while also funneling flow through the cooling system. And, indeed, the LaFerrari needs all the cooling it can get. Here are the main elements of the so-called HY-KERS (Hybrid Kinetic Energy Recovery System) powertrain: a 789-hp 6.3-liter V-12 with variable-length intake runners, a 13.5:1 compression ratio, and an Everestian 9250-rpm peak at redline; an oil-cooled 161-hp electric motor hung off the back of the seven-speed dual-clutch automatic; and a low-set, liquid-cooled lithium-ion battery pack that acts as a structural element aft of the passenger compartment.The basic slipperiness and lift inherent to the shape led to a dynamic-aero solution to keep the LaFerrari stuck to the road. All its wings and flaps are hidden when the car is parked, but they are the most obvious things about it in motion. Front and rear undercar panels continuously manage downforce by moving from a low-drag, or flat, position to a high-drag setting folded into the slipstream. And a wide fluke at the back constantly changes pitch and height, rising out from underneath the trailing edge of the engine cover. At 125 mph, downforce ranges from 200 pounds in the low-drag settings to 800 pounds with all the flaps and wings reaching away from the body, radically upping the car’s stability and adhesion limit.
Total system output is a claimed 950 horsepower, and it’s all orchestrated to highlight each element’s strength. It calls on the electric motor’s instantaneous response to provide a kind of boost, filling in the screaming V-12’s lower rev range. The result is a compound powertrain with shockingly smooth and immediate response; if you’re holding fourth gear and mash the throttle, you’ll swear from the kidney and lung compression that you were in second gear.
The car is technically a plug-in hybrid. There is not yet a pure-EV setting on the manettino steering-wheel switch, but later cars will offer drivers the guilt-assuaging luxury of purring up to five miles on battery juice alone.
The LaFerrari will have a limited run of 499 units, so it’s not a concept car. But it is highly conceptual: hybrid system for more torque, movable aerodynamic elements for elevated limits, and a driver sitting on the bottom of the tub for a more direct connection with the machine. It should not surprise anybody to learn that Cimatti, the car’s mastermind, builds his own mountain bikes that use the rear of the titanium frame as a spring element.
I first climbed into the car in the “Box,” Ferrari’s Formula 1 test and telemetry garage at Fiorano, located across the street from the factory. Inside, the car almost looks like a tactical aircraft. Everything you see is exposed carbon fiber with just a few Alcantara accents, and there are lots of pod-mounted buttons whose functions are almost entirely obscure. With the fullness of time, you learn the ways in which the menu buttons and four-position switches—one set at each of the driver’s hands—control the glass-cockpit instrumentation. But this is not recommended at speed.
Fire up the LaFerrari, and you can actually feel the barometric pressure in the garage change as the car clears its throat and then, at ignition, makes the whap of 100 pounds of nails hitting concrete. The driving position doesn’t feel that extreme, mostly because the car’s squared-off steering wheel is big and well placed, but also because a pull-lever by the seat bottom lets you slide the whole pedal set up to meet your legs.
I was told that I would get three laps—one warm-up, one hot, one cool-down—street value somewhere in the five figures. But it was hardly enough time to get comfortably up to speed in the car. What I interpreted was a kind of relentless brutality and directness. The powertrain responds like an electric motor while sounding like a big, brassy V-12. Somehow, the hybrid system preserves the engine’s inherent smoothness; it just adds more—more low-end torque, more linearity, more clearance to redline. You are never out of the power band. The part-throttle, on-off reflexes are hair-trigger. You have to adjust to all this, and once you do, no car will ever feel truly, head-hurtingly quick again.
I couldn’t hear the aero elements moving under the rawp of the engine, but I could feel their effects. The car is unerringly stable in a straight line under hard throttle, and braking zones feel usefully shortened, thanks to the big rear wing. In cornering, you have to be going fast enough to make the car stick. In a couple of tight turns, I jumped on the throttle too early and felt the back end come around, flushing my nervous system with adrenaline, making my fingers tingle. It’s hard not to worry about spinning the LaFerrari when you’ve seen an F1 driver do so, but it’s more likely that he had all the electronic traction helpers off, and not on their penultimate “CT off” manettino setting, which allows some sideslip before reining in the car. The application of this car to that track made the former seem big and hairy and the latter seem small and insanely technical. Then it was over.
Thankfully, we were also allowed some time with the car on the road. We took it up into the Apennine montane belt outside Maranello, where tight and undulating roads are cut into the hillsides. There, the car started to shrink. The power steering is odd in that it returns absolutely zero road feel; the electrically assisted system numbs out any hint of street surface, even big blemishes. But it is nevertheless some of the best steering I’ve ever encountered—direct, noiseless, and linear. The wheel’s failure to impart road texture almost doesn’t matter because all that info shoots up from the rest of the chassis like an electric shock. It’s akin to sitting on a motorcycle. Or, as Cimatti says, “In this car, you are the inertial mass.”
The car’s ride-and-handling balance favors both. It floats over bumps. Its suspension system is an evolution of the 458 Italia’s, with control arms in front and a thicket of links in back. What makes its over-the-road suppleness even more amazing is that it doesn’t have the 458’s real-time adjustable magnetorheological dampers. It just has these very cool, two-mode (normal and “bumpy road”) Öhlins coil-overs, which are expensive but not necessarily cutting edge. It feels softer, as if it’s running less spring rate, than the Italia.
The brakes reveal a bit of a stepped transition from energy regeneration to friction as you modulate, but, hey, nothing’s perfect.
What Ferrari has created here is something as cerebral as it is brutal, the Hannibal Lecter of supercars, the Richard Sherman of . . . Sorry. I’m stretching.
Martin Mull once said that writing about music was like dancing about architecture. That there is no way to capture on paper a great performance’s sweep, its pulse, its emotional effect. We may have reached the point where cars are getting so outrageously fast and so deliriously powerful that their performance outstrips our ability to invent new ways of conveying it. In some ways, writing about the LaFerrari is like playing poker about salad. It’s something that can’t be bound by the page; it’s a full-body experience. And yes, Mr. Redman, I survived it.
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