Fifty years after Enzo Ferrari began building race cars in a factory outside Modena and nine years after his death at 90, the poor, self-taught race driver who became the legendary Il Commendatore remains at the heart of this city.
His portrait hangs in pharmacies, laundries and garages. The city’s park is named for him. Any cab driver can show you where the company’s first, cramped office was or Ferrari’s last, palatial home.
The man who brought 25 world racing championships to Modena remains in the present tense. “Ferrari, he is a magnificent man,” said Valdez Gozzi, director of the Hotel Real Fini, where many visitors to the factory in Maranello stay. “Because of him, the whole world knows Modena.”
Last month, Italy celebrated the 50th anniversary of Ferrari, now owned by Fiat, with parades of race cars through Rome, exhibitions, factory tours and gatherings of Ferrari piloti at tracks such as Piacenza, where the first Ferrari raced, and the Bobbio-Penice, where Enzo last took the checkered flag.
At the center of the celebration was Ferrari’s latest, fastest gran turismo, the 550 Maranello.
An exemplar of its kind, it recalls the great GT and GTOs of bygone years: a short-wheelbase, 12-cylinder, front-engine berlinetta, or coupe, with the piercing profile and urgent proportions typical of the Pininfarina studio that designed it.
Traffic parts deferentially as the Maranello approaches. Teenagers on motor scooters trail behind.
The twist is that the Maranello, the 50th-anniversary Ferrari, the car the company says best captures its soul–is probably not a car Enzo Ferrari would have built. Enzo’s Ferraris had to be demanding and twitchy, with a hard-edged, race-car gestalt. No excuses, no compromises.
Such a car was the 512M Testarossa, which the Maranello replaces. Shaped like an ax head sharpened on all sides, the Testarossa is remembered as the most emotive cast member of “Miami Vice.” Like the sweaty detectives who drove it, the mid-engine Testarossa admirably overfunctioned in a few areas but was fairly obnoxious daily.
Its one redeeming virtue– beyond its peculiar, erogenous beauty–was that it was blazingly fast.
The Maranello is very different. For one thing, its engine is up front. This configuration sacrifices agility (mid-engine cars react more quickly to drivers’ commands) for a comfortable cabin, more storage, better visibility and sound isolation–all lovely qualities but not design imperatives of top-line Ferraris gone by.
Still, the 550’s cabin is an amazingly civil place to be at 200 miles per hour. The door sills are low and the firm, deep bucket seats are mounted high for ease of entry.
The interior consists of two scoops of tan Connolly leather and wool carpet cut out of the business-first black bulkhead and instrument console. The deafening sound system, climate controls, telescoping steering column and intuitively placed switches are swaddled in leather.
Visibility, headroom, legroom, cabin noise, even cargo space, are all first-rate, precisely what you’d expect if you had spent $60,000 on a Lexus SC400 sport coupe, but a wildly pleasant surprise for those who would lay down $220,000 for a Ferrari.
Despite its price, a front-engine Maranello also implies a cost-conscious practicality by the company, something in which Enzo Ferrari was famously uninterested.
The Maranello shares vital components with the company’s elegant front-engine, four-passenger 456GT coupe. The engine is the same 5.5-liter all-aluminum V-12, tweaked to produce an extra 50 horsepower for a total output of 485 horses and 419 foot-pounds of torque.
Finally, and the thing that might have galled Enzo the most, the front-engine Maranello, because it is less responsive than the mid-engine Testarossa, also is far more forgiving of driver error, less willing to pirouette off the road.
It is more than just chassis dynamics. Ferrari has fitted the Maranello with advanced electronics such as adaptive suspension and traction control.
To purists, this may seem like sacrilege, but it makes the Maranello far easier to drive, and fast, than past supercars.
From a business perspective, it makes sense to expand the Ferrari brand beyond the few zealots who could afford and handle a 500-h.p. car.
And yet a lap around a race track near Perugia confirms that, even with all its safeguards, this is not a car that suffers fools gladly. The Maranello delivers all the physiological yah-yahs any purist could expect of a top-of-the-line Ferrari. Jump on the throttle and the cabin is swamped with the voluptuous sound of the 60-valve V-12 painting the pavement with expensive 18-inch Pirelli tires.
The power plant heaves torque at every r.p.m. in every gear. At full, brassy roar, the Maranello jets to 60 m.p.h. in 4.3 seconds. Maneuver the chrome-ball shifter twice through the stainless steel gate and you’re rocketing at nearly 100 m.p.h., pinned to the seat. You’ve been under way for 8 seconds.
The adaptive suspension, when switched to “sport” mode (a “normal” setting provides a softer ride), hardens to a leatherlike compliance, giving the car a stiff, flat posture when cornering. On longer turns, after a fraction of a second as it electronically sorts its dampings, the car assumes a stance and holds it far past your willingness to test its limits.
The variable power rack-and-pinion steering is fluidly light and Wilkinson sharp, with 2.2 well-weighted turns from lock to lock. Will yourself into a corner and the car obeys. Should you need to correct, it answers with instant, athletic ease. Huge disk brakes, abetted by an anti-lock system, nonchalantly haul the car down from speed.
The 550 racks up impressive lap times but doesn’t have the visceral excitement of the Testarossa or even the V-8-powered F355.
That is by design. All the effort to make the car easier to drive makes it less a test of will.
Millionaire boy racers will love this car. With the traction control off, it is child’s play to place the 550 in any posture you want. To hit the perfect angle when exiting a corner, you simply roll on the power until the car’s back end drifts into alignment, add a touch of countersteer, then nail it. The scenery explodes into streaks of diverging color.
Nor can purists complain about the Maranello’s top end, which the company lists at 199 m.p.h.–give them some credit for modesty and call it an even 200. The Ferrari 550 is a full three seconds faster around the company’s test track at Fiorano than the Testarossa. But, in a way, it hardly matters that the Maranello is a better performer. Purists will grumble that to civilize Ferrari’s supercars is, inescapably, to diminish them emotionally.
That may be. But it seems Ferrari has built more than another fast car. The Maranello is a cleverly negotiated settlement between the realities of modern car building and the emotional expectations of the Ferraristi.
Having reached its 50th anniversary, Ferrari may outlive the old-school purists who would have it any other way.
