Latest news with #Ferrari550Maranello
Yahoo
21-02-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
Ferrari Roma
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. ]]>
Yahoo
17-02-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
Car of the Week: Arguably the Most Important Ferrari in Existence Could Fetch Nearly $8 Million at Auction
In 1948, a young Enzo Ferrari introduced his first race car intended for the road and available to customers, the pint-sized 166 Spyder Corsa. It came with a new Tipo 166 2.0-liter Colombo V-12 engine, a new five-speed racing gearbox, and a featherweight steel-tube chassis. The first two examples that Ferrari built and sold were matching cars purchased by brothers Soave and Gabriele Besana—aristocratic playboys and racers—who commissioned cycle-fendered custom bodies from Modena-based coachbuilder Carrozzeria Ansaloni. Gabriele was allocated chassis No. 002 C, while his brother got chassis No. 004 C. More from Robb Report The Ferrari 550 Maranello Still Hits the Sweet Spot as a Pure and Modern Italian Grand Tourer This Ferrari Daytona SP3 Is Signed by Charles Leclerc. It Could Be Yours for $5.7 Million. Police Just Busted a Crime Ring That Was Rerouting Deliveries of Rolls-Royces, Ferraris, and More Fast forward 77 years and Soave Besana's 166 Spyder Corsa, now the most-original early Ferrari in the world and a car never publicly offered for sale before, is about to cross the auction block. It's the worthy star of Broad Arrow's inaugural Villa d'Este sale on the banks of Lake Como, Italy, on May 25. 'The 166 Spyder Corsa is quite literally the earliest and most important Ferrari in existence today. While it is chassis No. 004, anything built prior to this car doesn't exist in any intact or original form,' says Barney Ruprecht, Broad Arrow's car specialist and its vice president of auctions. 'Nothing else on the market today, at any price, offers the cachet of this car.' Highlights of the vehicle's remarkable history include a sixth-place finish in the 1948 Targa Florio, competing in the grueling Mille Miglia road race in both 1948 and '49, and a multitude of Formula 2 and hill-climb starts in Italy and France. After its racing career ended in 1957, this Prancing Horse was preserved during an unbroken 50-year stewardship by the Clark family, owners of the Long Island Automotive Museum, in Southampton, N.Y. During the Clarks' ownership, it received such high-profile accolades as Best of Show in Ferrari Club of America National Meet in 2003, the Coppa per Dodici Cilindri award at the 2004 Cavallino Classic, and a class win at the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance that same year. Since 2015, it has been the prized possession of a prominent U.S. Ferrari collector who presented the car at Pebble Beach's Casa Ferrari gatherings in 2019 and 2022. Broad Arrow's Ruprecht believes that, for any collector, the car's Classiche White Book certification is key, verifying the originality of the bodywork, V-12 engine, and gearbox. According to Ruprecht, originality is virtually unheard of with any competition car of this age. In addition, the Ferrari comes with a mountain of documentation and samples of media coverage, including an extensive profile in the September 1966 issue of Road & Track magazine. In it, American author and Ferrari authority Stan Nowak discusses his brief ownership of chassis No. 004 C. Nowak writes that, after a long search, he heard about the car being on the market from a friend living in Paris. 'I was sure we had found one of the oldest Ferraris in the world. The owner too had the same idea of the importance of the car and the price was rather high, but there was no turning back and I bought it.' Shipping the car back to New York, Nowak discovered the vehicle was in need of a complete restoration. 'The estimates were staggering and it was apparent that I could not keep the car and restore it. I needed help and quickly.' The automotive museum's Henry Austin Clark offered to take over the car and fund the restoration, with Nowak overseeing the work. Clark paid $3,800 for the vehicle. The exhaustive, concours-level restoration was completed in 1966, just in time for Nowak to enter that year's Vintage Sports Car Club of America races in Connecticut. It was the first time he'd ever driven the car, and the first time he'd piloted a Ferrari. 'The handling is a joy; plenty of predictable oversteer coming out of turns. Hairy. But very safe. If you do get into trouble, you just back off and steer out of it,' wrote Nowak. 'What's a Ferrari all about? It's that 12-cyl engine, and it's the smoothest, most turbine-like device imaginable. In most other cars of this type, you feel the power come in with a bang at about 4,500 rpm and you know it's 'on the cam,' but not the Ferrari. It's just there and all the time.' It seems the concours-quality restoration of the car attracted the attention of even Enzo Ferrari himself. In 1971, Clark was reportedly offered $25,000 for chassis No. 004 C, which at the time was more than the price of a new Ferrari 365 GTB/4 Daytona Coupe. Instead of selling, Clark transferred ownership to his son, James H. Clark, in 1973. For the following 42 years, James entered the storied Ferrari at high-profile automotive events around the country, while methodically maintaining it. This rarefied and storied example from Maranello is estimated to fetch between €5.5 million and €7.5 million (between $5.8 million and $7.9 million). Regarding the car, Ruprecht opines, 'Any enthusiast of the Ferrari brand, including both older, established collectors and the rising generation now in the market, will feel drawn to the DNA of such a legendary marque. It would be an immediate world-class acquisition. . . .'Best of Robb Report The 2024 Chevy C8 Corvette: Everything We Know About the Powerful Mid-Engine Beast The World's Best Superyacht Shipyards The ABCs of Chartering a Yacht Click here to read the full article.
