Ferrari F80 review

Ferrari's once-a-decade hypercar enters the arena as a V6 hybrid

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The Ferrari F80 is the Prancing Horse that’s too fast for Fiorano. It’s the latest limited-run, extreme-performance Ferrari of the kind that appears once a decade, a lineage featuring the GTO (aka 288), F40, F50, Enzo and LaFerrari, and it is the first that hasn’t been demonstrated at Ferrari’s home test track.

Instead, it was presented at Misano, a wider and longer circuit than Fiorano and more suitable for a car with the F80’s astonishing performance.

Misano is popular with motorcycle racers and looked as expansive as Silverstone on the video I watched of an Audi R8 GT3 lapping it. The F80’s speed made it feel about half the size in reality. Stay tuned for a review of Ferrari's fastest-lapping car it has ever fitted with with numberplates.

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DESIGN & STYLING

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To the details first, though. The F80’s development timeline almost mirrors that of the 499P Le Mans-winning race car. The two are different – this is not a road-going competition car – but there are similarities both in ethos and with some mechanicals.

The F80 has a two-seat carbonfibre passenger tub, 5% lighter but 50% stiffer than a LaFerrari’s (the next most recent special), with the passenger slightly offset behind the driver so they don’t bang shoulders in a cabin that’s 50mm narrower. 

At the front and rear are mostly extruded aluminium subframes, from which hangs double-wishbone suspension all round, with 3D-printed upper wishbones and active Multimatic spring and damper units similar to those that made their Ferrari debut in the Purosangue, mounted horizontally to maintain a low centre of gravity.

As well as having adjustable damping, they extend or withdraw to control pitch and roll, so there are no separate anti-roll bars.

The car is 4.84m long, 2.06m wide and just 1.14m tall, and it has a 2.67m wheelbase. It comes with carbonfibre wheels as standard (you can buy forged alloys to supplement them), wearing 285/30 R20 front and 345/30 R21 rear tyres, either Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2s or stickier Cup 2Rs. 

Brake discs are a new carbon-ceramic material, 408mm in diameter at the front, 309mm at the rear.

In the car’s middle is the latest iteration of Ferrari’s 3.0-litre 120deg V6, which made its debut in the Ferrari 296 GTB and also powers Ferrari’s Le Mans challenger. But it has been tweaked here to levels not even found in the 499P.

More than 200 components have been changed from the 296’s version of this engine, so it makes 888bhp at 8750rpm – Ferrari’s meteoric target of 300 metric horsepower per litre.

Its two in-vee turbochargers also include a small electric motor to get them spinning quickly rather than waiting for the boost (which I think technically also makes them electric superchargers, but we know what an e-turbo means).

The V6 engine is supplemented by an 80bhp crank-mounted electric motor, sited beside the engine so there’s only 100mm between the crank centre and the bottom of the sump, in turn meaning the engine can be mounted much lower. The top of it is about knee height.

This all drives through an eight-speed dual-clutch automatic gearbox with no reverse. At the front is an e-axle with two electric motors of 141bhp each (they do the reversing), and when everything is firing at once, the total system output is 1184bhp (or 1200 continental horses).

Then there are the F80’s aerodynamics. Three bargeboards split air at the front and direct it either over the top of the car or underneath to a diffuser that, at 1.8m long, constitutes more than half of the underbody. There’s a rear wing that raises by 200mm and through a 22deg angle. In total, at 155mph the F80 makes 1050kg of downforce, split 460kg front and 590kg rear, which is twice as much overall as LaFerrari.

You don’t get a choice about which aero mode it’s in. The car can easily predict what’s best, and apparently “it’s not so nice” if available downforce disappears mid-corner. The engine is canted 1.2deg upwards to the rear, to give the diffuser more room to work.

Stitching all of this together is what must be some heinously complex software and subsequent tuning. There’s no rear-steer, but there is torque vectoring via braking on both axles, plus a rear electronically controlled limited-slip differential and yet another iteration of ‘Slide Slip Control’. Braking is by-wire, with regeneration from all three electric motors, including from the crank-mounted motor, which can drag on the engine as a form of traction control. 

Should you opt to record yourself over a hot lap, the car will decide for itself when it would be best to boost the motors to give you as fast a lap time as possible.

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INTERIOR

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The interior is excellent. Buttons are back, the driving position raises your legs so that air can pass beneath the tub and the steering wheel pulls so close you could almost lick it. It’s heavily squared but entirely in keeping with the Le Mans-adjacent view out.

Paddles are still attached to the column, which usually I like in Ferraris, but here it feels like they would be better on the wheel. The supportive driver’s seat adjusts but the passenger’s pads don’t.

It’s more hospitable than, say, a McLaren F1 or GMA T50, which seat their passengers further behind the driver. This gives just enough space to clear shoulders while leaving it easy to chat across the cabin, so it is a sociable car too.

There’s only a tiny amount of luggage space behind the occupants’ heads, mind. 

ENGINES & PERFORMANCE

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This, it’s fair to say, is not a hybrid system designed for economy. It’s “for performance and nothing else”, according to Stefano Varisco, Ferrari’s manager of dynamics and energetics.

The battery, which sits crosswise just behind the passenger cell, is only 2.3kWh. If you tried, and there’s a Qualifying mode in which you can, the car will flatten the battery within a lap.

Our first go is on track. The first thing of note is that this car is extraordinarily, rocket-ship fast. 

With motors helping spin the turbos and boost low-rev torque gaps, there is no turbo lag. The engine, regardless of whether you’re at the 900rpm idle or near the 9200rpm rev limit, surges. 

There are no Bugatti-like delays while it takes a breath. It’s more like a McLaren P1 or McLaren Artura, or a 296 GTB, but more so in its immediate punch forwards.

Ferrari’s numbers say it will go from 0-62mph in 2.15sec, but rather more significant is the 5.75sec 0-124mph time: LaFerrari took 6.9sec.

Ferrari’s gearshifts (and the paddles that enable them) are usually the best in the business, and there’s no exception here.

Upshifts are immediate, downshifts impeccable. The engine, a variant of the ‘piccolino V12’ – a six that is meant to sound as good as one with twice the cylinders – is engaging, although it headbutts the rev limiter with alarming ease. I don’t mean that as a criticism. I just feel clumsy, until better drivers than me say they repeatedly do the same.

What’s odd is how quiet the car is from the outside. Towards the end of the pit straight, where the car must be pulling 140mph, all you hear is the whoosh – vast quantities of air moving, like a fast jet entering the Mach Loop, according to photographer Jack Harrison. A least that will make it easy to adhere to track-day noise limits.

RIDE & HANDLING

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There is a very fast corner at Misano. “It doesn’t look like a corner on the track map,” they say in the briefing, “but when you get there, it is.” 

Even I can feel the aerodynamics working as I take it faster than I feel I should.

Pitch, dive, roll: all are brilliantly contained. Just a little of each is allowed, for feel, to lean against. With this suspension it would be possible to tilt the car into a corner, which would feel weird. Bump absorption is first-class.

The steering is medium-weighted and consistent, and although it’s only two turns between locks, as Ferraris tend to be, it is linearly responsive and neither nervy nor over-sensitive.

Lower-speed corners need less faith than aero-heavy ones, but this car likes precision. 

Brake feel is brilliant on corner approach, and you can detect something somewhere easing back an inside wheel to help it turn, but it’s not an open-book hoon machine like other Ferraris. It wants to put power to the front wheels, wants you to ease open the steering and get it into a straight line, because that way is fastest. And it likes going fast.

Still, if you do turn all the assistance off, it will move around. There’s a touch of steady-state understeer as you begin to turn, but it boosts through that easily and adopts a benign slide, until I think the front axle decides it has had enough of this and starts to pull it back straight because it would like to accelerate, thank you. So while it will slide – unlike, say, a Ferrari F8 Tributo – that’s not its natural state.

If it feels like anything else I’ve driven, it reminded me of an Audi R10 TDI Le Mans prototype. They share a snug high-foot driving position, precise medium-weighted controls, a steering wheel on which your hands never leave the 2:45 position and immersive and unburstable but perhaps undramatic performance.

At eight-tenths effort, an F80 will go twelve-tenths faster than almost any other production car. It’s a brilliant car, but it’s the performance and the capability rather than the drama that impresses.

Given all of that, I don’t expect it to be a great road car, but it surprises me. Ferraris tend to ride well and, with three damper settings, the F80 eases over even the gnarliest surfaces. I remain aware of, but not daunted by, its width.

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MPG & RUNNING COSTS

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Ferrari has sold 799 F80s and they’re €3.1 million a pop before local taxes.

VERDICT

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If it hits the spot, it could boost the allure of the hybridised SF90 and 296; miss, though, and it’s another sports car that carried more cables and fewer cylinders than it should have. I wonder if there are more than just 799 F80s riding on how it performs. 

Lapping 5.0sec faster than a LaFerrari around Fiorano is one achievement; making you buy it is a different one.

If all of this sounds like a very nuanced and complicated car, given that Ferrari has a V12 that could quite easily blow customers’ minds, you would be right. And if it had used it, Ferrari would have had “very happy” customers, according to Matteo Turconi, Ferrari’s senior product marketing manager. “But we’d have lost a lot of aerodynamic efficiency.”

The V12 is a big engine and eminently charismatic, but Turconi says Ferrari has stopped using it for the “top-performing” cars: “We have to be honest to our heritage. This is the best car,” he said. 

Should best be in air quotes? There is a good argument that the F80 is true to Ferrari’s heritage. Each of the previous specials has a link, of sorts, to Ferrari’s motorsport stars of the time.

But the decision to run a hybrid V6 shows a continued commitment to electrification, a willingness to make a nuanced performance car and even, perhaps, a little bravery.

As a road car there's enough for luggage space for 24 hours, they say. But whether on the road or, like its 499P stablemate, on track, the F80 feels ready for both. It may not be the most dramatic Ferrari, but I think it is the ‘right’ one.

Matt Prior

Matt Prior
Title: Editor-at-large

Matt is Autocar’s lead features writer and presenter, is the main face of Autocar’s YouTube channel, presents the My Week In Cars podcast and has written his weekly column, Tester’s Notes, since 2013.

Matt is an automotive engineer who has been writing and talking about cars since 1997. He joined Autocar in 2005 as deputy road test editor, prior to which he was road test editor and world rally editor for Channel 4’s automotive website, 4Car. 

Into all things engineering and automotive from any era, Matt is as comfortable regularly contributing to sibling titles Move Electric and Classic & Sports Car as he is writing for Autocar. He has a racing licence, and some malfunctioning classic cars and motorbikes.