POLL: If F80 were offered with different engine choices

Yes and no. Listen to a Daytona Comp and you won't really care if it won races or not.
People go crazy over the pagani or gma or even the cgt/lfa sound note and those cars didn't win any race or their engines.

It's emotional.

Sure the 296 sounds decent, but a 992 gt3 sounds so much better. Or even a z06.

Amazing engine and all. But im sure im not alone in saying it doesnt make me giggle when I hear one at full chart.

 

I agree with you all that it would have been even better with a newly developed NA V12.

But by now, we know, thats not what happened. Maybe someday they will develop a new V12. So, it’s great to imagine what might have been, but it’s not reality.

 

V6, the car is perfect, the reviews were excellent, if you like the V12 Ferrari makes V12 cars buy one of those this one is a V6.

 

Ferrari choose it because a) it's an engine they already had and B) they could play t he ''engine raced in le mans'' card

 

100% this

 

Yes, but, it won. 3 times. In a row.

 

Unassisted NA V12 that revs to 10k

 

NO !!! Totally wrong !!! I do not give a **** about winning races.
The reason we all say V12 is cause it sounds heavenly.

 

Super excited about the license plate I ordered for my F80, cant wait to put it on.

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Jag 'Liked' this plate...

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Of course, what matters most is to spend as little as possible above all...
I hope that no one is naive about this.
In the end, it's just a revised and corrected 296 V6. operation much less expensive than designing a new V12 !!!

 

Piccolo 6
Piccolo Lira

 

The ‘winning heritage’ marketing angle would mean more to me if the BOP measures weren’t so overbearing.

 

People who care about these things.

 

You are making weight comparisons between a partial powertrain weight to just an engine weight. So your analysis is not on target. I wrote extensively on post #45 at https://www.ferrarichat.com/forum/threads/f80-chris-harris-on-cars-ferrari-f80-driven-on-road-and-track.708337/page-2#post-150195445

Just doing an engine swap as suggested by this poll doesn't work in reality. It would have to be a new car.. It would be much heavier (4100 lbs) and bigger to match the power performance of the hybrid tt v6 F80. The diffuser and aero would be compromised.

Remember that the GMA car is 2,200 lbs and is spartan inside. And the Valkyrie has to
be driven with earplugs in and noise canceling headphones on top of those!

There is no performance match unless a 1200 hp NA engine can be developed that weighs 290kg and is smaller and in height and width. No engine exists like this.

The hypercar series is about road
cars that have racecar tech, not just better road car tech.

My post demonstrates why an existing or even moderately enhanced V12 can't work. Plus emissions too.
https://www.ferrarichat.com/forum/threads/f80-chris-harris-on-cars-ferrari-f80-driven-on-road-and-track.708337/page-2#post-150195445

 

Whoa there...the choice was just which power train. I don't want 1200hp. It's WAY too much for a road car.

I don't think the GMA T50 is any more spartan than the F80 is inside to be honest.

A redesign would suit the F80, hopefully they can give the outside a make over too

 

You raise a good question: how much horsepower is enough? But I think a core question is, what kind of experience does a driver actually want, and how do we define that?

For me, the ideal car delivers capability of acceleration, speed, and cornering that always outpaces my own skill while still feeling predictable and composed. I don’t want the car to unpredictably break away at the limit. I want the car that gives me confidence as I explore what it can really do.

Take acceleration. A zero to 60 time of 2.7 seconds averages about 1 g. A quarter-mile time of 9 seconds also works out to roughly 1 g of sustained acceleration. The F80 reportedly does 0 to 60 in 2.15 seconds, or around 1.27g. Most drivers won’t test race a quarter mile at 1.27g every time they drive, but the point is that the car can do it, and it makes that kind of performance feel exciting while safely usable.

And it’s not just straight-line speed, as we know. The F80’s cornering and braking are now converging on Le Mans levels. That’s a big reason why the car is easier to control and safer to drive fast. When everything, including acceleration, handling, and stopping power, feels balanced, the car becomes more approachable even at the limit. That's what the best driving reviewers were also saying. (I didn't write this to copy them). The envelope of performance that come from those variables is safer to explore. This is the beginning of next level integrated performance. Ten to twenty years from now, the F80 will be known as the genesis of this evolution and standard.

People don't buy laptop PCs just for the speed of the CPU any longer. They buy the best for their integration into one great experience for the user. It's the same story here.

All of the innovations as a full system are what make the F80 stand out as true evolution. With early Ferraris, you were mostly "buying an engine." With the F80, you're getting a full system: engine, transmission, chassis, next gen significant aero, and controls all working together. It reminds me of modern fighter jets like the F-22 or the next-gen F-47 / NGAD. You're not just buying trust. You’re buying something built to perform as a whole, like the new NGAD will be. It's a new level of capability.

I don’t think Ferrari made the F80 just to chase numbers. It feels like they’re trying to show what the next chapter of performance looks like, something that builds on their past but isn’t stuck in it.

 

I've always gone by the saying ''it's more fun to drive a slow car fast than a fast car slow''. It's not just the F80 but vast majority of cars have been chasing outright speed (acceleration and corners) for a while now. It's a silly game.

IMO driver involvement has been chiseled away in favour of these numbers because ''the computer knows best'', and for the vast majority of drivers all this tech makes them look and feel like super heroes and that's all they really care about anyways. I've always liked to blame the Nissan R35 GTR for this because since that car all performance manufacturers have been in a game of 1 upping the other/previous models.

It's always been inevitable that this was going to happen, of course. It's not the R35's fault it could've been anyone or anything.

I love the idea of the T50, it's low weight and "only" 660hp still make it ludicrously fast and I seriously struggle to see how anyone would take a look at that thing and then say '' what this needs is more power".

I guess I'm a bit more old school and I prefer more involving cars even though they'll be much slower on a track. If a car I'm buying it's going to be used on the road 99% of the time that's where I want it to be the most fun. If I was spending a lot of time on track (since you do/did Challenge series you'll know plenty about that! ) it's better/more fun to buy a dedicated track/race car. Long term it's cheaper to run and crash damage doesn't matter nearly as much. Plus...all the speed you want for your budget. A Formula 2 car would be insanely fast and reasonable to run.

It's not just the F80 I find too fast for the real world, it's a whole lot of cars....hell even the T50 is but due to much more driving involvement it gets a lot of points from me.

 

Haven’t driven either yet, but after watching an unhealthy amount of reviews on both, I’d be willing to bet the F80 is a far better street car than the T50, T50 has more storage. On top of that, the T50’s fit and finish just doesn’t match its astronomical price tag.

Also, big horsepower doesn’t automatically make a car undrivable on the street, boring, not exciting. Take the SF90 for example, it's as docile as a Toyota Prius when you want it to be, but with the push of a few buttons, it’s ready to rip your face off. I’d rather have the power available when I choose to use it than not have it at all. More power never hurts. The acceleration of a modern, high-powered hybrid is intoxicating and addictive. Honestly, after getting a taste of it, I don’t think I could go back, correction, I will never go back.

I have a GT3RS 992 and I love driving it, very precise, tactile, etc. but to me it does lack power and because of that I prefer the F296 over it, the F296 to me it's more exciting.

 

As soon as you manage to use 100% of the power, you can want more, but that’s never the case with these cars. When you talk to professional drivers, they find all that power ridiculous and unusable on open roads. I tend to think their opinion is valuable and objective, as their job is to extract the maximum from a race car. All this power ends up being aimed at two very limited satisfactions: straight-line acceleration and ego. Let anyone who gets 100% out of an SF90 on open roads (which I wouldn’t recommend to anyone) come and talk about it here !
The power-to-weight ratio of the T50 is already far more than necessary !

 

I have a T33 on order. Other than a taycan for instant errands with no warmup, it will be the only other car than my F car collection. It will be fun and the closest to a go-kart that I will own. I own everything from an SF90 (agree with @Fortis) to a very unruly but exciting TdF and started with a 360 stick. The SF90 has this ridiculously large performance envelope. And yes, its performance envelope makes a huge difference in enjoyment in the unpopulated hills behind my house. It's crazy exciting with massive stopping power and an endless engine. Its performance reminds me of the fun I had in a 488 Challenge Evo. But much safer. So safe that I take my driving up one stage.

I love my TdF. But it is like riding a dragon. There is no way I could drive safely on those same hills to the level of performance of the SF90. The TdF requires constant attention to get the power down and stay forward. It wants to spin the rear wheels at 70mph in a straight line on the freeway. There are a million ways to go off the road in a TdF, but one very satisfying and very careful way to go forward quickly. It doesn't give you some ease of safety, like the SF90 does. But I love it.

Another one is the 458 that is super fun too. And it has less performance than the T50 or T33. The T33 will be somewhere between a 458 and a Pista. I can max out the 458 in the hills behind me. When the 458 was introduced, I heard from plenty of 430 Scuderia friends/fans that the 458 was "too soft a car" and "too easy to drive" and had "more power, but why?". Similar comments about who needs more performance and "rather drive slow cars fast." If "rather drive slow cars fast" was true for the market, Lotus would be a huge company, amongst others. How many "rather drive slow cars fast" car companies exist now, and what is the historical track of these Lotus-type companies? Failure. It's because big money goes to buy high performance, not lower performance.
In terms of racing, how big would a televised Mazda Miata class race series be compared to F1 or NASCAR. Miniscule. There is a huge global audience that wants to watch fast acttion. Not slow cars of the past going fast.

 

In my use case I can certainly extract everything the SF90 has to give in various settings, I don’t care how many pro drivers tell you stories, I am enjoying the power of my car on the street and at the track, you might be different, likes, dislikes, skill and ability, we aren’t all cut from the same cloth, one size does not fit all, there is something for everyone out there, live and let live.