Car and Auto Reviews

Archive for the ‘Ferrari’ Category

All manufactures tend to have these well known formulas for their sports cars that are just as distinguishable as the brand itself. Take a V8 for instance, push the displacement out to 5.4L and drop it in a coupe and you get a Mustang. Slap on two turbos on a V6 3.8 Liter Japanese car and you get a Nissan GT-R. Supercharge a 6.2 liter V8, call it an LS9 and you get a Corvette ZR1. Squeeze 300 horsepower out of a tiny, AWD sedan with a 2.5 liter flat four cylinder engine and you get a Subaru WRX STi. But what happens when you go back to the drawing board, sketch out a fluidly designed 3-door hatch back, with vivacious curves and stunning lines, paint it – oh, let’s say – red. Then, stretch out the nose; drop in a 12 cylinder engine and squeeze in an all-wheel drive system. What do you get? With years of automotive mental algorithms going through my head, fitting the features with the engine, platform, and associated brands leads me to nothing. So who is building it? No, it’s not the new Prius, it’s the new Ferrari FF.

That’s right, Ferrari decided to go where no one has gone and build a small hatchback car, with a whole 12 cylinder engine that grips the road with all wheel drive. Three components that traditionally are almost never seen together. My first reaction is, how in the world did they manage to create a small hatchback with 12 cylinders? Their largest capacity engine ever, by the way. That seems almost disproportionally designed. But it isn’t. The usual elegance and finesse of Pininfarina design is not absent in the Ferrari FF. My second reaction focuses around the fact that they fitted their first Ferrari ever with All-wheel drive, which is great and all but it brings everything down to one question in my mind: why? Read the rest of this entry »