Ferrari Roma

Yahoo

21-02-2025

God bless whoever was brave enough to ask the question at the end of the monthly Ferrari 'town hall' meeting concerning exactly why it is that the company doesn't make a car like the much-loved, big-selling Ferrari 550 Maranello anymore.
Surely that must have been how the new Ferrari Roma came into being - not that the company is letting on.
The 550 was one of Ferrari's modern high watermarks for front-engined GTs. Smart-looking, usable, soulful, fast, involving and, most of all, really well sorted for the road, it was followed up by increasingly wild and expensive front-engined, twelve-cylinder successors that incrementally became less and less about everyday usability and accessible handling appeal and more and more about outright pace, grip, noise and lurid performance thrills as the years passed.
The void that strategic shift left in the Ferrari model range has evidently taken some time to become apparent to the company, but we'll let them off on that score.
It was a bit of a mental leap to invoke the spirit of a car like the 550, not to mention so many other of the company's V12 grand touring greats of the 1950s and 1960s, with a reimagined fixed-head version of the turbo V8-powered Ferrari Portofino M – itself not the most revered of modern Ferraris, after all.
And yet what the related Roma proves is how much can be achieved through a handful of very well-chosen technical changes. The car has quite a rich and ritzy new-generation cockpit, too. And last but by no means least, it might be the most dazzling achievement yet of Ferrari's own in-house Centro Stile design department. It's an important new model addition, this – and not just for Ferrari, but with implications for the whole of its segment.
The Roma is probably the best-looking new normal-series-production Ferrari since the Ferrari 458 Italia, possibly even since the F355. It has sublime proportions, some beautifully pristine surfaces and just a hint of visual menace about it. Some lovely detailing, too.
The way the carbonfibre skirts and front splitter echo the shape of the bodywork above them, almost like a reflection in millpond-smooth water, is very clever indeed.
Ferrari does admit that, under the skin, the Roma's all-aluminium chassis and body-in-white share a fair bit with the Portofino. The firm's claim is that, in those two areas combined, the Roma is 70% new, although I suspect that's 70% by individually itemised components, not by volume or weight. Sure enough, if you compare the technical dimensions of the car with those of the Portofino, you'll quickly see that the two wheelbases are identical.
The Roma's roof height is significantly lower, however, and its body and axles wider. At the same time, some of the new and repositioned mechanicals of the Roma's driveline have helped deliver it a centre of gravity some 20mm lower than that of the related hard-top convertible. It's also nearly 100kg lighter.
Since we originally tested the Roma, the Portofino has been replaced by the Ferrari Roma Spider. Good decision.
The Roma is a 2+2 (something the celebrated 550 Maranello wasn't) with a bold and quite lavish interior very much intended to make inroads into the customer bases of the likes of Audi, Mercedes-AMG and even Bentley.
The Roma's back seats are usable only for smaller adults and kids, but it has a boot big enough for a couple of small flight cases and that even offers some through-loading space for longer loads.
The seats are soft, easily berthed and comfortable over distance, and its infotainment technology is new also. The footrest in the footwell is too close though which is uncomfortable on longer journeys.
The Roma inherits its dual-screen 'human-machine interface' - which, in this instance, means a digital instrument screen and a portrait-oriented infotainment screen - from the Ferrari SF90 Stradale. The 16in instrument screen is controlled via a haptic thumbpad on one of the spokes of the new steering wheel. The new wheel hub design consolidates and simplifies some secondary controls and moves others from the front of the wheel to the back so that it looks less cluttered.
You control the window wipers through a little knob rather than a rocker switch, for example, which does make life easier. Although other functions are operated via capacitive touch-sensitive switches, rather than physical buttons, which are only lit and 'active' at certain times and didn't make life easier for this tester.
The Roma is powered by much the same 3.9-litre twin-turbo V8 that powers the Portofino and the Ferrari GTC4 Lusso T, although some new cams and cleverer turbo controls allow it to make 20bhp more peak power than in the Portofino, as well as a slightly broader spread of peak torque. In the exhaust, Ferrari has added gas particulate filters but removed the Portofino's conventional silencers, adopting a new bypass system that helps regulate and control the overall noise level instead.
Downstream of the engine, there's an eight-speed dual-clutch transaxle gearbox derived from the one on the SF90 plug-in hybrid supercar, which has a broader spread of ratios than the Portofino's seven-speeder and sits lower in the rear of the car.
Downstream farther still, the Roma gets Ferrari's torque-vectoring e-differential as standard, as well as its very latest Side Slip Control 6.0 and Ferrari Dynamic Enhancer electronic torque vectoring systems.
The Roma makes a much better first impression than either the Portofino or its related California predecessor ever managed.
It feels lighter and leaner than so many sporting GTs, both under power and on turn-in. And it sounds the part, too: not exactly sweet or woofling but as musical as you can imagine a turbo V8 with a flat-plane crank really getting and full of brassy, tremulous, likeably genuine audible character.
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