THE SILENT KILLER

FERRARI'S LATEST HYPERCAR SPEAKS SOFTLY AND CARRIES A MASSIVE STICK

- BY DANIEL PUND

“I COULD HAVE SWORN I HEARD" 3-D-printed tires.

” That can’t be right. Who would do that? What does that even mean? I was sitting in a hotel conference room during an after-dinner Ferrari technical presentation, and by this time in the evening, my jet-lagged brain was beginning to power down. Until then I’d mostly survived the fusillade of technical details on this newest Ferrari hypercar, the F80. Such is the car’s complexity that Ferrari had to split the technical presentation into two parts with a 10-minute intermission for some much-needed espresso.

I wore down the points of three bright-red Ferrari-branded pencils taking notes in a fat reporter’s notebook. Sixty pages filled with linguistic stubs such as “Halbach magnet arrangement” and “narrowing the cabin provides air impluvium.” I will admit that I stopped writing before the end of the presentation.

The 1184-hp F80 is the sixth in a line of Ferrari flagship supercars stretching back to the Eighties. These once-a-decade-or-so specials—the 288 GTO, the F40, the F50, the Enzo, and the LaFerrari—have always acted as an expression of the state of the Ferrari art. The F80 takes it to an extreme. It is a rolling science experiment, a Mars rover for sports-car fans. It’s laden with active suspension, active aerodynamics, 3-D-printed upper control arms (but not 3-D-printed tires), three electric motors, two electric-assisted turbochargers force-feeding air into the engine, and a brake-by-wire system, all mediated by a hypercomplex array of software. Long gone are the days when a company like Ferrari could create a supercar by modifying an existing model, as it had done in the Eighties with the lovely 288 GTO. Today, Ferrari wages a campaign of technical shock and awe.