Road Test: Ferrari 488 GTB is a turbo to pressure all rivals

You just knew that when Ferrari finally decided to put turbochargers in its mainstay V8 sports car, they were going to deliver something fiendishly fast. And they have. It's no longer Gallardo/911 Turbo- fast, like the 458 was. It's now Aventador fast. At 458 money.

At least half of the 200km of launch roads are lumpy, broken, crumbling and wobble erratically through the Appenine mountains. Short straights are interrupted by blind, unpredictably cambered bends that haven’t well survived the ravages of loneliness, icy winters and the Mille Miglia.

It’s the sort of road most sane car companies would think twice about using for a new, brisk crossover SUV.

Instead of that, our ride is wearing the badge that so many fast car lovers assume to be the pinnacle of brilliantly polished, highly-strung fragility.

But there’s nothing highly strung about the 488 GTB. Its engine might have gone from naturally aspirated and 4.5 litres to twin-turbocharged and 3.9 litres, and that pair of high-tech, ground-breaking IHI force feeders is grabbing all the headlines.

And on these roads, there's nothing fragile about it, either. It's the car's ability to cope with brutality attacking it from beneath and still use every scrap of its 492kW of power that stands out. Not just that it has 492kW of power and is a car so fast that Italy provided almost no opportunities to get to full throttle in the first two gears.

And, when you pound the throttle from mid-revs in third gear, Ferrari’s latest V8 coupe attacks the horizon so hard that you can feel the skin on your face move back.

Sound and fury

That should be a surprise, in plenty of ways. It’s pitched against Lamborghini’s naturally aspirated V10 but makes a mockery of that because it smashes from zero to 200km/h not just faster than the Huracan and not just faster than the V12 Aventador. Its 8.3 seconds of fury and noise make it faster than the lightweight, track-pack beast of an Aventador SV.

Sure, being rear-drive limits its ability to get everything out of the V8 to 100km/h (though you’d have to be petty to quibble about its 3.0-second attack), but it gets past this to rip through the quarter-mile in 10.45 seconds and goes on beyond 330km/h.

Abilities like these instantly dissuade you from considering the switch to turbochargers as a negative, even if the 458, the last of the atmo breed, was the epitome of high-revving, naturally aspirated supercar perfection. It wasn’t that long ago that we were calling Ferrari’s hardcore 458 Speciale the best sports car in the world, and one of the most complete cars we’d ever driven.

The turbocharged 488 GTB is four-tenths faster to 100km/h than the 458 and more than two seconds quicker to 200km/h. Or, put another way, it’s 20 per cent quicker. Even for the most loyal of atmo fans, that’s going to be the right price to switch. I loved this one, Mr Ferrari, but, well, you mount quite the argument . . .

It doesn’t reach its power peak right at the tip of its engine range, at 9,000rpm, any more. Instead, it hits the peak at 6,200rpm and holds it to 8,000, which is phenomenally high for a turbo V8.

Torque delivery

There’s 760Nm of torque, too, but you have to have the seven-speed dual-clutch transmission in seventh gear before Ferrari will let you have it. Ferrari’s engineers were paranoid about it feeling and sounding like a turbo-diesel.

“It’s not our philosophy to have one or two or three gears of overdrive. We want to have short gears to manage the bends,” Ferrari’s engineers argued.

“We limit the torque in the first three gears. We want a certain slope of the torque and achieve the maximum peak of torque as far up as we can in revs, so you gt 710Nm at 6,500rpm.

“It’s limited but not by much. We always want you to enjoy the vehicle and exploit the full range of the vehicle and push to the rev limiter, with the noise of the intake to give you the feeling of a car that always wants to push.”

Not only does Ferrari fiddle the torque for each gear, but every gear has a completely different torque curve, getting a longer peak with each rising gear number.

Everything in the engine has been attacked so that it spins faster and more freely, including the pistons, the crankshaft, the valvetrain and the new twin-scroll turbochargers themselves.

Ferrari insists it’s 85 per cent new compared with the 458, but there are some significant bits pulled from the parts bin. It carries the steering rack out of the 458 Speciale and also the same magnetically changeable dampers, while the braking system has been plucked from the megadollar LaFerrari.

The result is a genuine supercar that is also, if anything, an easier car to drive very, very quickly on both the road and the track.

It’s almost impossible to throw it away on the track, even when you flick the steering wheel’s switch to its Race mode and then, again, when you flick it further around to get it into crazy Tokyo-drift-king mode.

The SSC2, which is the side-slip control, has been further developed and now, instead of figuring out the throttle opening for you and working the electronically variable differential to do the trickiest sliding work for you, it now fiddles with the damper rates as well. There’s almost nothing it won’t do to make you faster, and safer.

It’s almost at the point where there’s nothing – nothing – frightening about pushing the 488 GTB to its handling limits within a handful of corners of sitting inside it.

Taut, responsive steering

The steering is taut, responsive and carries the same perfectly measured weight as the 458 Speciale, and the grip envelope might be so ridiculously high compared with mere mortal cars, but it’s easy to get to. It’s easy, too, to get beyond and bringing it back again makes amateurs look like competition-standard operators.

That’s a strange thing to say with limits as high as these, but it’s nonetheless true. The 488 GTB is certainly the easiest mid-engined Ferrari (and maybe even the easiest mid- engined car of all time) to extract everything from.

The damping will go largely unsung in most publications, but it’s vying with the turbo V8 to be the most outstanding part of the car.

You can adjust it, via a button on the steering wheel, to cope with bumpier roads, but we’d been belting it across the Futa Pass for a long time before we figured that out. And it hadn’t been unsettled in any way whatsoever up to then.

It’s not just outright grip, but how it can get so much power down, so easily and comfortably in the face of such horrors beneath it. You can stand on the throttle on a light-footed direction change and the skid-control light will flash, but you’ll barely notice a thing from the coupe as its systems sort it all out for you to keep you safe and give you more and more speed.

Carbon-ceramic brakes

It helps that the carbon- ceramic anchors are stupendous and deliver the kind of power you only usually have under your foot on a competition car.

We got data logging that showed it pulling 1.96g under brakes at Fiorano, and doing it repeatedly, without a trace of fade and with plenty of feedback and adjustability through the pedal.

It corners flatter than the 458, so don’t for a second think it’s because it has been softened off. It’s just so comprehensively good below decks that it almost doesn’t feel mid- engined. All the areas where mid-engined cars can get tricky? Yeah, the 488 GTB doesn’t have any of those.

Don’t for a second think it has been built to favour the road over the track, either. It’s two full seconds quicker around Fiorano than the 458. Actually, it’s quicker than the Enzo around Ferrari’s own test track.

The high-speed stuff is helped along by genuine downforce (104kg across the car at 200km/h) from the active aerodynamics, the low speed is helped by the massive amounts of air being fed into its intercoolers and by the time it doesn’t spend changing gears.

Greater focus on driver

It’s impressive in other areas, too. The dashboard looks similar, but it’s all new, with greater focus on the driver. The satellite navigation unit is still awkwardly clunky (at least it was in Italy) and easily disoriented, but the glovebox is bigger than a lot of sedans and the front-mounted boot is fortnight-holiday large now. Plus there are three storage bits in the centre console that are useful for keys, water bottles, phones . . .

But it’s not perfect. The visuals have lost the remarkable, precise cleanliness of the 458 and there are one or two angles where the chunk carved out for the engine’s air inlet looks out of proportion. But turbo engines need more cooling, plus the car now has genuine downforce, so there are prices people should be prepared to pay, and that’s one of them.

Engine note

The other is the noise. Ferrari argued hard that they’d spend a lot of time on perfecting the engine note to make the turbo motor sound like a real Ferrari.

It sounds great. It really does, especially at either end of its range. It fires up deep and loud and gruff, and it sings nicely and proudly at higher revs. But there’s a big chunk in the middle where it’s not as sweet as we had hoped – though (and this is critically important) that’s measuring it against the frenetically glorious symphony that was the 458 engine.

Again, though, that’s a price most people will be deliriously chuffed to pay to get the added pace, power and flexibility of the 488 GTB.

After all, there won’t be many other cars in this class that will give so much of themselves to make you look like a superstar every time you point it at a corner.

And surely feeling and looking like a superstar is the whole point of buying a supercar?

The lowdown: Ferrari 488 GTB
Engine: 3.9-litre, twin-turbocharged V8 petrol
Output: 492kW/760Nm
Transmission: 7-speed dual-clutch
Fuel economy: 11.4 litres/100km (24.7 mpg)
Emissions: 260 g/km
Price: To be confirmed for Ireland