FERRARI 296 SPECIALE A

GTS convertible takes a hardcore turn in stripped-down Aperta guise

- MATT SAUNDERS

The greatest supercars very often don’t make perfect sense.

Logic would have allowed no need, nearly 20 years ago, for Ferrari to build a limited run of 499 open-topped versions of the untamed 430 Scuderia to celebrate the 16th constructors’ championship of its Formula 1 team. Who would want a Scuderia Spider ‘16M’ anyway, when they could just have a lighter, quicker and even more focused 430 Scuderia coupé instead?

As it turned out, the car was admired and demanded enough to spawn several successors, the latest of which, the 296 Speciale A (for Aperta), has gone on sale in parallel with the equivalent Speciale berlinetta, which we drove in Italy last October.

The Speciale A is ostensibly a ‘speciale’ version of the 296 GTS convertible, then. It gets a retractable hardtop roof that pivots around electrically to stow under the popup rear deck panel. That, combined with some structural reinforcement to the chassis, makes for some 80kg of extra bulk for the open-top version compared with the regular Speciale. With a lightweight engine and plenty of body panels made from carbonfibre rather than aluminium, however, the Speciale A still weighs 50kg less than an equivalent GTS — even if the equivalent Speciale berlinetta managed a 60kg like-for-like saving.

Between a more powerful V6 combustion engine and a more powerful axial-flux electric motor than the regular GTS uses, meanwhile, the rear-drive Speciale A makes 51bhp more than the car on which it is based — fully 870bhp in all. Even Ferrari’s own figures can’t separate it from the regular Speciale hardtop on 0-62mph sprinting performance, which is timed at 2.8sec.