2001 Ferrari 360 Reviews

The mighty Ferrari is benchmarking its newest supercar against a Chinese upstart.A Xiaomi SU7 Ultra was seen leaving the Prancing Horse’s headquarters in Maranello.Ferrari bought the high-performance electric car for testing and development purposes as it prepares its first electric car next year, according to reports.The SU7 Ultra is the flagship vehicle from Chinese smartphone producer turned carmaker Xiaomi.It is the fastest electric car around the Nurburgring and delivers a bonkers amount of grunt.The SU7 Ultra uses three electric motors to make an insane 1138kW, which is about the same as 10 Toyota Corollas combined and more than the quad-turbocharged W16 engine from the Bugatti Chiron.  Those outputs are good enough to catapult it to 100km/h from a standstill in blistering 1.97 seconds on the way to a top speed of 350km/h.The SU7 Ultra weighs 1900kg, which makes it a relative lightweight by performance electric car standards and means it tips the scale at about 400kg less than the Taycan Turbo S.It’s a seriously impressive machine on paper, and one of the world’s most intense car makers has taken notice.The Italian supercar firm is in the final stages of developing its first electric car, which it will unveil on October 9 this year.If it is to be a proper Ferrari it’ll need to be better than the competition, and the most advanced electric cars are from China.Details of the electric car are scarce, but we do know that it will make an “authentic noise”, according to CEO Benedetto Vigna.A previous report by Reuters speculated its price tag could be as high as €500,000 (A$886,900), although this hasn’t been confirmed directly by Ferrari.Ferrari is slowly transitioning to low-emissions power, with models such as the plug-in hybrid GTS 296, GTB 296 and SF90 Stradale, making up 51 per cent of its sales in 2024.The company has no plans to ditch V12-power from its range until it is forced to by various governments.Meanwhile Xiaomi's SU7 sedan and new YU7 SUV have set the Chinese market on fire, with hundreds of thousands of orders well exceeding the electric upstart's capacity to fill demand.

You could buy 142 Subaru WRXs, 25 Porsche 911s, or seven average-priced houses, and one apartment, in Melbourne, for $7 million, or you could have just one Ferrari F80.Believe me when I say this is not the kind of math you want to be doing when you are driving one of the very few existing examples of this absurdly astonishing supercar on a public road. Every other driver starts to look like a potentially expensive threat, particularly in Italy, where people drive as if their lives depend on their next coffee.There are other potentially even more alarmingly large numbers to worry over when you are invited to take Ferrari’s freakish F80 for a blast around the Misano race circuit in Italy. Foremost is the fact that this car has 1200 horsepower, which is 20 per cent more power than a Formula 1 car is allowed to deploy. Just think about that. I thought about it a lot as I lay awake the night before trying it.The F80 can also allegedly destroy the 100km/h mark faster than an F1 rocket, in just 2.1 seconds, and can smash its way from zero to 200km/h in 5.75 seconds. My favourite factoid, however, was intoned by an impossibly calm-sounding Ferrari driving instructor who told us there was one corner of the Misano track where we’d be able to feel the full whack of the F80’s active aerodynamic package, which provides more than one tonne of downforce… at 250km/h.Making all of these speeds possible is an implausibly engineered version of the turbocharged 3.0-litre V6 hybrid found in the already hugely impressive Ferrari 296 GTB (which was, until now, the greatest car I’ve ever driven), where it makes 614kW. In the F80 it’s delivering 883kW, which quite simply makes every other car I’ve ever driven seem a bit limp.My first drive was in the passenger seat, which is uncomfortably tiny and shoved towards the passenger door, and slightly behind the driver’s elbow, because Ferrari decided to give this car a “one-plus-one” seating position, thus making the far more pleasant driver’s seat the centre of attention (serious consideration was given to making it a single seater but apparently Ferrari owners like to frighten hell out of their friends).With a racing driver at the wheel I felt the downforce very keenly indeed, as well as the full force of the car’s incredible carbon ceramic brakes, which haul the F80 from 100km/h to zero in 28m, or from 200km/h in 98m. As for the acceleration, it was so unfeasible, so violently virile, that I wondered whether it was too late to change careers, or fake a heart attack. Actually that wouldn’t have required much acting.Obviously an enormous amount of development work has been done on the engine, but it also benefits from new e-turbos - turbochargers with electric motors that can help spin them up to 160,000rpm when there’s not enough exhaust gas to work with, basically eliminating lag - borrowed, among many other things, from Ferrari’s F1 team.   As we pulled into the pits I thanked my Italian friend and pointed out that I would not be driving the F80 like that. He looked like I had told him the car was ugly (and dear goodness it is not, it’s stunning, with a real Formula 1 aesthetic and butterfly doors) and slow. “But… why NOT?!!?” He knew, of course, what I was about to discover, which is that this F80 performs miracles. Not only does it somehow get almost double the power that a V10-engined Lamborghini Huracan produces to the ground without digging holes in the surface or causing the tyres to explode, it’s actually encouraging to drive.     On my outlap, I was wondering what kind of lunatic would want a car with this much hairy-handed gorilla grunt and treating the throttle as if it was covered in scorpions. A few short and furiously fun minutes later, I was madly in love with the F80 shove. A few hours later I was pushing the car to the point where I was sweating for fun rather than from fear.Much like Lamborghini, Ferrari has come to accept that there is a point where a car has too much power to drive the rear wheels alone (the engineers tell me this is around 1000 horsepower), and has developed a new all-wheel-drive system for the F80, using an electric motor in each front wheel and extremely clever torque vectoring.Then there are the various Side Slip Control and traction systems, which are constantly analysing just how much power can go to any wheel without throwing you sideways, systems which are working in milliseconds.All of this works so well that the F80 never felt snappy, even with a real driver at the wheels, just entirely confidence building, encouraging; it makes you feel like a better driver. Like a super human one, even.   I have never enjoyed driving anything this much, nor have I ever driven anything so fast, while still feeling comfortable. The steering, though the very F1-style wheel, is perfect, the gut-squeezing feel of the downforce keeping you nailed to the ground through corners just adds more confidence, widening the envelope of what you can achieve.And the next day, they let us drive it on a public road, where my insane co-driver hurled it quickly and easily past the 300km/h mark, as Italians cheered.Here, too, the F80 surprised and delighted, because it was nowhere near as brutally hard as I had feared. It’s not comfortable, nor as blessed with ride/handling balance as a 296 GTB, but it’s pretty damn good. And I have a new favourite vehicle.This is a hugely significant car for Ferrari, which only applies the term “supercar” to its most elevated and exhilarating vehicles, those which come along roughly once a decade. The first Ferrari supercar was the legendary GTO, followed by the F40, then the F50 and the Ferrari Enzo. The last entrant into that rarefied club was the La Ferrari, a properly wild V12-powered machine launched back in 2013. The F80 recently destroyed the lap record set by La Ferrari at the company’s famed Fiorano track, beating it by 4.4 seconds.Sure, the price is absolutely absurd, but they could charge twice as much and people would still buy one, and I’d still want one. Around 20 Australians have already done so. 

Ooft, Ferrari has done it again. The Prancing Horse has taken the covers off its new Amalfi coupe, which replaces the Roma in its line-up.

If you’re a man - particularly a married one with kids and decades between you and your single days - hearing “bachelor pad” might be ever so slightly bittersweet, but there’s also every chance those words make you remember a time in your life when you were so footloose and fancy free you were basically Kevin Bacon.

Ferrari has continued its two-decade long line of ‘special’ versions of its smaller mid-rear engined supercars with the arrival of the 296 Speciale, a fire-breathing 647kW version of the twin-turbo, V6 plug-in hybrid.

With a 3.9-litre twin-turbo V8 in the front driving the rear wheels, the Roma is a classic Ferrari two-door 2+2. We leapt at the opportunity of driving the Coupe version in and around the iconic Italian brand's home town of Maranello, Italy.

If we offered you a free Ferrari or free Toyota which would you take?

You can thank/blame (take your pick) Scottish engineer James Watt for the confusing way we measure engine performance in cars. He was the person that came up with the bright idea of measuring power based on a horse.

Ferrari will launch its first-ever electric car in October, CEO Benedetto Vigna has confirmed.The announcement was made at Ferrari’s Q4 and full-year financial results conference, where Vigna refused to give any details of the combustion-free model aside from stating that it would be launched in a “unique and innovative” way.Five more models will launch alongside it next year, one of which will include the 12Cilindri Spider as well as a Roma replacement, which went out of production last year.Prototypes of the electric supercar have been previously spotted testing in Ferrari’s hometown of Maranello, Italy, giving some details of what to expect in terms of design.Surprisingly, the four-door model appears to be an oversized hatchback more than anything, with its fake exhausts undermined by high-voltage stickers indicating that it is, in fact, electric.Vigna has previously confirmed that the electric model will stay true to Ferrari’s core principle of driver engagement, with the EV set to deliver “authentic noise”, suggesting a program similar to Hyundai’s Active Sound+ that synthesises fake engine noises on the Ioniq 5 N is on the cards.A previous report by Reuters speculated its price tag could be as high as €500,000 ($829,580), although this hasn’t been confirmed directly by Ferrari.The move comes as Ferrari announced that hybrid models, such as the plug-in hybrid GTS 296, GTB 296 and SF90 Stradale, made up 51 per cent of its sales last year.Despite rivals such as Aston Martin delaying their electrification plans, Ferrari remains committed to having hybrids and EVs consisting of 80 per cent of its line-up by 2030.It will still produce combustion-engine models beyond then, with the brand’s CEO previously stating he believes synthetic e-fuels are the “way forward” for the brand.Ferrari’s revenue rose 11.8 per cent in 2024 compared to the year prior, with deliveries up marginally by 0.7 per cent to 13,752 in total.Vigna expects “robust growth” in 2025, bucking the trend of a tough economic outlook that many mainstream car brands are facing.

As the automotive industry's peak body warns of challenging times ahead for the new-car market in Australia due to rising costs and high interest rates, there is one corner of the market that is thriving.