The new Ferrari California is magnificent. Honestly, Ferraris just get better and better. The two newest – the 599 and now the California – are fast, refined, inspiring, agile, well-made and when you’ve finished your journey you’ll just get out of the car and say ‘wow’. Yet they’re also easy to drive, apart from the small matter of having to concentrate hard when pulling in the horizon at three miles a minute.
But as the capability has blossomed, the beauty has been besmirched. Ferraris aren’t gorgeous any more. The California has a fat arse. The 612 is fussy and ill-proportioned. The Enzo is more bug than bird. Even the F430 lacks the visual grace and profile poetry of the old F355, the last lovely Ferrari.
Perhaps design house Pininfarina has gone astray? (Unlikely: look at new Alfas and Maseratis.). Or has Ferrari lost that innate Italian coolness, as its role models have shifted from Lorenzo Bandini and Ludovico Scarfiotti to Michael Schumacher and Kimi Räikkönen? Some vulgar owners, dripping gold, bellies as taut as a blancmange, clearly do not help.
I put all this – apart from the Schumacher/Räikkönen uncool bit – to Ferrari president Luca di Montezemolo (a man who oozes style) when I had dinner with him a few days ago. He said the styling was dictated by aerodynamics and the need to keep a Ferrari glued to the road at 180-plus. That’s why the Enzo is all wedge and scoops and slats and chunky lines. That big fat rump of the California – more bustle bum than bikini bottom – helps aero performance, or so Luca says. I can testify it is brilliantly stable at big speed.
Ferrari road cars are becoming more like its F1 cars, designed by scientists not artists, styled in the wind tunnel not in the studio. Engineers of course celebrate such thinking; aesthetes mourn it.
Give me both. The F-15 Eagle and F/A-18 Hornet fighter jets prove beauty and high-speed functionality are possible; so did Concorde and, before that, the Spitfire. Maserati and Aston Martin combine speed and sensuality (though neither is as meticulously engineered as a Ferrari); so does the new Alfa 8C. Old Ferraris were both great racers and great beauties.
I want to say ‘wow’ when I drive a Ferrari. And be grasping for superlatives, not the designer’s neck, when I first see one.
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