Ferrari F80

A bit off topic here, but Microsoft designs really good and innovative products, the Surface line is well above almost anything in the market quality and functionality wise, nothing Apple offers comes close. Microsoft showed OEMs how to do 2-in-1's and the market for them has been in a constant rise ever since.
The Windows Phone was way ahead of its competitors, with features and functionalities that Apple and Android have either not yet adopted or have taken years to do so.

They have other big issues, but design and innovation are definitely not them.

 

Every one is reinventing the steering wheels for next decade. Mclaren Bugatti ect… where is innovation of F80 steering wheel?? And the UI… you know they are charging for the color or rev counter even though it is digital LCD screen?? Why do they keep HVAC control cheeeeeaaaapppest plastic black panel????

so many questions and F80 has so much to deliver for the money they are charging

 

This confirms my belief that in the US (possibly Canada too), the manual transmission is being revered as something special/exotic, whereas in the "Olde Worlde" it is so common that even my 70 year old mother drives one; hell, I knew how to drive a manual since I was 12, in the late '80s.

Agree 100%. I still miss my Nokia Windows phone; much better than any Android/i-Phone I have had since. My company was on Apple Macintosh computers, then I decided to transition to MS Windows. Never looked back since.

Why re-invent something that works? BTW, what Bugatti did, Citroen did 20 years ago, with the steady steering boss...

 

You really think current haptic steering wheel works? Well good for you.. not good for me..
Also, the layout is pretty terrible no matter how they do this with physical buttons. So, it is pretty lame attempt and certainly not hypercar quality at all.

Why on earth do they think we prefer the display and settings control on steering wheel surface with nintendo button?? This is bad joke..

oh one more thing. With that stupid buttons on the surface, we can not have full carbon finished steering wheel but plastic black finished steering wheel.

 

Not at all, but they have reverted to physical button in the F80. It is a matter of opinion whether one likes buttons on the wheel itself. Like it or not though, this is how all racing cars are and to be honest racing teams know a couple of things about ergonomics.

 

The Harry Metcalfe piece raises some interesting points and on others I find some large room for doubt. He is obviously highly knowledgeable and offers very sound views so I don’t in any way dismiss them, without agreeing with all of them.

I’m not certain about the preference element of what he says. People have different backgrounds and are raised in different eras. The things that inspire us have also evolved. When I was young I loved hot hatchets and had a bunch of them - Golf GTI, Peugeot 205 GTI, Fiesta XR2i etc. I was travelling back with him from a football match last night in an EV and we began a conversation. He drives a small EV and has a newly-bought Porsche Cayman, quite an aggressive car for a young (and very privileged) guy. He has also driven well our Speciale, GT3’s and GT2’s around tracks like Silverstone, Goodwood etc. He told me he loved what’s EVs have brought to the auto market. He felt they were absolutely ideal for certain things. For example, he reckoned the hot hatch was far better as an EV. Hot hatches need great packaging, sporty looks, reliability, great performance and chuck-ability and I agree, EVs can offer a lot for most of those things. I asked him “but what about weight?” He replied, if it feels light then fine - and modern brake, suspension and tyre tech will help with that. His EV is a small, high torque car, not especially sporty but his belief is that it could easily be made like that and many soon will. (I know this to be true from various manufacturers I’ve spoken to).

So I asked a question. “Would you prefer the next Cayman over your current one?” “No chance! But don’t think that means I think ICE is always better, sometimes it just isn’t and you have to deal with it dad, it’s going to be a big part of the future”.

I guess my point is that tastes change. He is a bright and very capable young man, who can (mostly!) make good decisions for himself and knows what he likes and wants. So Harry is a product of his time and what he has been brought up to value. He loves manual transmissions but I have many friends, even of similar age that don’t anymore. Like me (and Realzeus) they’re just over them. We have three really interesting and older manual transmissions in our garage. They are great, and manual is part of that. But I just don’t prefer a manual over a DCT in something like a GT3. I tried the 992 GT3 Touring in manual. What a lovely change and clutch action. But I again ended up wishing I had bought a PDK car, so I sold it. When I was younger, nobody in the US knew how to drive a ‘stick shift’. At least nobody I knew knew. Now it seems many do and are catching up. There is an undeniable mechanical interaction that comes from using a manual but to me it just interrupts flow. I would not prefer an old torque=converter type box over a manual but the DCT has changed everything for me especially as a left-foot braker. I have each limb controlling an element and it gives me thr feeling of having absolute control of the car, immediately in my hands and under my feet.

The fact that some disagree with this, like my son’s views, is the point. What is appreciated in the future will be influenced by what those who are young now feel. Currently Ferrari hybrids don’t do too well in terms of residual. It is definitely a problem. But this exact scenario has happened before. Early GT3s and GT3 RSs were very difficult to sell. And the immediate precursor to that, 964 RS and 992 RS, were also hard to sell. Too stiff and stripped out and more expensive! Nobody could work it out, not even the press, until they could and the world went crazy for them.

Where Harry does have a point, and this applies to all exotic cars, including n/a, turbo and hybrid, is that they have got really really expensive. I think this is a seminal moment for the industry and especially Ferrari. The increase in price is out-of-step with the times. It will probably lead to very disturbed depreciation and a change in the market. Even Harry has been used to not losing money on the cars he buys. But how realistic was that really? The advent of ‘cheap money’ between 2008 and 2022 drove the market. But that has ended. Manufacturers need to take heed, otherwise there will be a bloodbath. It’s happened before. It’s also why it is hard to criticise Ferrari for adapting their product offering to take account of changing tastes. We can all say they can afford to do the things that we enthusiasts like, but really, they can’t. Change is coming.

 

Another perspective: Ferrari has figured out what it cost them to cure all the ills on the current hybrids, so they are charging the clients for all the future warranty work on the F80 ;-)

 

So true.

 

A REAR WING WASN'T THE HYPERCAR INEVITABILITY

In the pictures below you can see the six Ferrari hypercars of different eras divided into two groups, one containing the models that have a prominent rear wing as we see in the competition cars and, the other, those that have no rear wing but something that resembles more a rear lip spoiler . As we know, one of the functions of the rear wing and rear lip spoiler is to generate downforce and in this particular the former is much more efficient. In the case of F1s that use large rear wings, around 150 Km/h the car can generate as much downforce as its weight (the minimum weight of a F1 is 795 Kg) and by the time it reaches the end of the straight at its maximum speed, the downforce it is probably three or four times the weight of the car.

So how we explain why the Enzo and the LaFerrari don't have prominent rear wings like the F40, F50 and now the F80? The answer is very simple and goes by the name of Luca Cordero Di Montezemolo.

The Enzo design was originally proposed by Sergio Pininfarina to Ferrari with a monumental rear wing like the F40/F50 but Montezemolo told Pininfarina “Sergio, I'm sure you're good enough to get the same downforce without using a rear wing! ”. Silence, followed by Sergio’s answer. “Now this is a big challenge, but we will try.”
In the case of the Enzo the shape was sculpted in the wind tunnel with the primary objective to produce a lot of downforce without a rear wing, 775 Kg at 300Km/h compared to 500 Kg for the PaganiI Zonda. In the Enzo most of the downforce is contributed by the ground effect diffusers at the bottom of the tail. Many other supercars have them but Enzo’s are far more powerful because its high nose draws a lot of fast air flow towards the diffusers.

I have no idea whether in the design proposals that Flavio Manzoni presented for the LaFerrari there was a version with a rear wing. However, the feeling I have is that even if Manzoni really wanted to have his rear wing, he would never dare to propose such a thing to Montezemolo. However, after more than 20 years, we now know through the SF 90XX and the F80, that after all, Manzoni fancies to incorporate rear wings.
In the case of the LaFerrari the car stability and adhesion are also achieved without a large rear wing. Through front and rear undercar panels which continuously manage downforce by moving from a low-drag, or flat, position to a high-drag setting folded into the slipstream. At the same time, a wide fluke at the back constantly changes pitch and height, rising out from underneath the trailing edge of the engine cover.


The examples of the Enzo and the LaFerrari prove that a rear wing wasn’t the Hypercar inevitability .


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Three truisms:

• Change is inevitable.
• How things change is not always inevitable.
• Change is not synonymous with progress. They can be related, but often aren't.

So what does it mean for me to accept these changes? I'll never learn to appreciate an EV or even a quiet, low revving ICE. I can't stand all the nannies (I drive with ESC off most of the time) which are becoming increasingly intrusive and more difficult to disable (I have to remember to turn off automatic braking and blind spot assist every time I get in my wife's S-Class, and I have stopped using cruise control on highways in that car because the distance control cannot be defeated). A car's weight matters.

So for me, accepting these changes will mean keeping old cars running. I'm not going to buy a car that doesn't excite me. And that's pretty depressing, to be honest. Sure, there are great cars in the back catalog and I'll have fun with them. But the idea that the time will come - not yet, but at some point - when I will never again feel excited about a new car? That's pretty hard to swallow.

And so, I share my frustrations. Part free therapy. Part, the naïve hope that someone, somewhere is listening and in a position to influence how things change.

 

have to confess I really injoy reading your posts,
or I would rather call them analysis.
Many time I am thinking you are posting some engineer's expert opinion on given topic, just to realize, middle of you post, they are your own words.
Thanks.

 

Look what Elkann has done to Stellantis. Same will happen at Ferrari. Will just take longer, as Ferrari can ride on its own coat tails for a while longer, so to speak.

 

Thank you for your kind words.

 

for them Ferrari is a gold mine at the moment....they will keep it for a long time...

 

The side view on the f80 makes it look like a Lego technic model.... I really dislike how squared off the front fender is

 

There was once a Countryman who possessed the most wonderful Goose you can imagine, for every day when he visited the nest, the Goose had laid a beautiful, glittering, golden egg.

The Countryman took the eggs to market and soon began to get rich. But it was not long before he grew impatient with the Goose because she gave him only a single golden egg a day. He was not getting rich fast enough.

Then one day, after he had finished counting his money, the idea came to him that he could get all the golden eggs at once by killing the Goose and cutting it open. But when the deed was done, not a single golden egg did he find, and his precious Goose was dead.

 

Above all, he could make a golden status at LCDM, because without him Ferrari would no longer exist today!
There are few of us who have an internal vision of things here, and we agree on the same observation. People don't want to hear it and think it's resistance to change, which is not true. It is normal that those who have an allowance try to legitimize the car and say that it is extraordinary, but in reality, we know everything that this is not true! When you have people who have no culture, no historical knowledge of the brand making decisions, it gives this messy result. If we add to this that the priority is to maximize margins despite the quality of the product, we get this: recycling. There was room for another, but more expensive, strategy. Everyone talks about style and Manzoni, when that's not the real problem. He is a man of great taste, but who has never solved the essential question: what a Ferrari must be. He does not manage to provide an answer, as Fioraventi did straightforwardly. It oscillates between the desire for simplicity, and complexity, and the result you know it... The problem becomes even more complex when the people who decide do not know "what a Ferrari should be" either. The guiding principle that existed with LCDM has completely disappeared. Finally, if we add a marketing department that has no brand culture and that seeks to sugarcoat what is being done, rather than thinking about what should be done, we get the current recipe. By automatically legitimizing everything Ferrari produces, you are playing against your own side !!! (General remarks)

 

I agree….

 

And THAT'S the part I love.

 

Great text, spot on. Thank you .

 

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Elkann is not the architect of Stellantis’ problems.

 

Same for me. I was just thinking how good the F80 looked in those pics. As a LaFerrari owner, I’m quite surprised how much I prefer the F80 side profile compared with the LaF. Seeing all those mules, I fully expected to not prefer the F80 in any view. But overall, the F80 makes the LaFerrari seem very feline. Not a problem, but aggression can be helpful for a hyper car. At the reveal I also liked the front but some of the photos since aren’t so flattering. The rear is less beautiful than the LaFerrari but it’s very imposing and conveys power and strength. I would have liked the spoiler to be fared in a little more but so be it.

I’m going to go further for the fun of it….I think F80 looks the most hyper car of all 6 in those pictures. It looks slim, aggressive, low, detailed, technical, the least like a ‘normal’ super car.

 

Until I see the car in the metal, the front view is problematic for me. But we’ll see.