Ferrari F430: simply the world's best convertible

Published Mar 31, 2005

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We should be on the autostrada that spears up through Emiglia Romana, near Modena and Ferrari's Maranello home, but we're not. We're on the downward-spearing side, going the wrong way and likely to incur the wrath of those behind the carefully planned magical mystery tour.

First drives of Ferraris are always like this: there are route instructions, yes, but they are cryptic to all except the route planners (whoknow where they are going anyway) and worryingly short on distance information.

Is that left turn in one kilometre or 20? And the map is no help; there are more villages in Italy that don't merit a place on a map than almost anywhere else.

We don't care that much, though. We're in a Ferrari F430 Spider, the new £127 050 (about R1.5-million at today's rates), open-top version of the F430 Berlinetta that has itself only just arrived in the right-hand drive UK, and our navigational volte-face merely means we'll be in it for longer.

Naturally, the roof is stowed, something that takes 20 seconds of finger pressure on a button, and such is the roof's intricate folding regime that the engine, under a transparent cover immediately behind the cabin, remains visible.

We have the sight of the engine (what other car in the regular price lists displays its sculpted engine castings so brazenly?) and, with roof down, we can hear the sound by which innocent bystanders are always engulfed.

Who says driving can't be fun any more? Even a congested motorway is fun when you're in Italy and in a Ferrari. These cars aren't seen by sneeringly envious, lip-curling have-nots as playthings of the idle rich, as they too often are in Britain, because where cars are concerned Italy is refreshingly free of such sad souls.

Italians celebrate the car, they don't judge its occupants, and a Ferrari is practically a national treasure.

Let me digress a moment. Several years ago I was in Italy driving the new, previous-generation Maserati Quattroporte for Car magazine. We needed photographs of the Maserati taking a hairpin bend quite quickly and there was a house on the chosen bend. After I had passed a couple of times, someone came out of the house.

This means trouble, I thought. In the UK, this tends to be the prelude to some form of complaint. Next pass, nobody was in view. On the way back up again, the Maserati's engine howling encouragingly, the whole family was standing in the garden, cheering. In Italy, people don't feel guilty about enjoying cars.

Back on our autostrada, it helps that our Ferrari is on Prova number plates, the paper plates that say this is a factory test car. Time was when these virtually exempted you from speed limits and even now they act a bit like a force field.

This is just as well, because everyone wants to race our Ferrari. It's as if they want to get so close that they can hear the crackles and screams of the V8 engine as I pull away from another Golf GTI glued to the back bumper only seconds ago.

Really well-mannered

Like the Berlinetta, this F430 is searingly fast. Its creators say it will pass 300km/h and reach 100km/h in 4.1 seconds but there's more to the pace than these facts. The 4308cc engine creates up to 367kW, making it the most efficient naturally-aspirated (neither turbocharged nor supercharged) engine in production in terms of power per litre.

It also produces meaningful thrust across its considerable rev range: that max power arrives at a giddy 8500rpm but the Ferrari forcefully forges ahead from 3000rpm and is as well-mannered as you could wish - even at 2000.

Huge power at high revs no longer means an engine dyspeptically burping fuel and flames at low revs, an engine in which you would feed the accelerator in gently otherwise the fire would go out.

Thank today's engine management systems for that; the trouble is, such systems work so well that an engine can become characterless and carmakers then have to identify what gave character to an older engine and add some artificial imperfections.

Before, the way an engine felt and sounded happened through tradition and serendipity but now, like brand values, there's microfine analysis and no scope for risks. It's not "Let's try a straight-through silencer, there's one on the shelf over here", more "We need to tune the Helmholtz resonator in the intake tract and add a fuelling pulse to get that third disharmonic."

Ferrari is a master at this. Like most others, Ferrari uses electronic drive-by-wire throttles which, in theory, open no more than necessary to deliver, within the engine's capability, the acceleration requested by the driver's right foot.

Aural vanity

But art rules over science in the F430 Spider. Push the pedal a little way at, say, 2500rpm and it will gather pace with a deepening burble. Push it hard from the same engine speed and there's a deep, rattly, cackly throb like that of an old Ford Escort rally car on twin sidedraught Weber carburettors.

The throttles have opened wide not for extra acceleration but because it sounds racy. A kind of aural vanity.

We're not doing 2500rpm on the autostrada, though. Rather I'm changing up and down through the gearbox to nudge, frequently, three or more times that engine speed because it sounds so good.

The process of gearshifting is a delight, too: this F430, like most, has the optional F1-shift transmission (£6 250, about R73 000 at today's rates) with an upshift paddle, a downshift paddle and no clutch pedal.

I have often bemoaned the jerks, pauses and lack of finesse of earlier such systems but Ferrari has it near-perfect, almost as good as VW-Audi's DSG system and probably rather stronger.

The sun is beating down and the steering wheel tugs gently over changing surfaces and cambers as the aerodynamic downforce builds up and the road parts like the Red Sea as we howl towards another knot of traffic. My head is starting to hurt. It's that sound. It's fabulous, but there's rather a lot of it.

Louder than the Berlinetta

I can't believe I'm saying this, as one who in the distant past put loud exhausts on his old heaps and, before then, cardboard flappers in the spokes of his bicycle wheels, but even though the F430 conforms to EC drive-by noise regulations they clearly don't cover the way I'm driving.

Nor should they, but the Ferrari has actually made the Spider louder than the Berlinetta.

In the car with a solid aluminium roof (the F430 is an all-aluminium structure, by the way), a by-pass valve opens at 4500rpm, when under load, to cut out part of the silencing system. The V8 can then howl to its heart's content and the CD player is redundant.

In the Spider, though, the valve opens at only 3000rpm and the merest whiff of accelerator movement, so even when you're trying to be discreet you can't help but be the centre of attention.

The solution is to become a drip, and turn the manettino knob on the steering wheel to "wet". This not only makes the traction and stability systems keener to intervene and calms the gearchange speed but also puts the bypass valve operation back to how it is in the Berlinetta.

I think it would be better to have a separate sound-effects switch to allow a shrinking-violet mode while still having a good time.

Guess the car

Violets are on our agenda, actually, because it's lunchtime and we're in Parma. This is the fourth, olfactory, "sensory experience" of our tour, with perfume to be sniffed. The first was "sight", which was, yes, seeing the Ferrari at the freezing Palazzo Ducale in Sassuolo where our drive began.

The second involved visiting Verdi's house, seeing his pianos and hearing Verdi music; the third was the tasting of culatello, the best Parma ham from perfect pig loins. The fifth, quaintly, is called "tact"; it awaits us at the Galleria Ferrari in Maranello and involves being blindfolded and guessing the identity of three past open Ferraris by touch.

I will get only one of them right (a Dino 246 GTS), to my shame.

If you read my report on the original F430, you will know that as well as being ludicrously rapid, it is the most fantastic fun on a sinuous road. Here is where the real sense of touch comes in, as you feel the Ferrari latch into a bend with the massless eagerness that is a mid-engined car's speciality.

Then you feel the forces shifting, and then, just as you might expect the combination of power and tail-heaviness to make the force irresistible, you feel the Ferrari's secret weapon come into play - the electronic differential, or E-diff.

It apportions power to whichever rear wheel needs it to maintain the intended course, judged by sensors watching over steering angle, acceleration, lateral G-force and anything else useful. And the great thing about the E-diff is that, unlike a conventional ESP system, which brakes individual wheels to keep you on course, it diverts power to where it is needed instead of inhibiting it, so you don't feel yourself being slowed down.

The E-diff works even when all other electronic systems are switched out, although "sport" is the usual setting on the manettino.

Here is a convertible so fast, so hard-edged if you want it to be, and so capable that it transcends normal notions of sybaritism over purity. A true Porsche 911 lover, for example, would never have the convertible, but here it's OK to do so and more than half of F430 buyers probably will.

And if you press that button again, the roof emerges from beneath its composite cover, bends and twists and whirrs, and 20 seconds later you have a snug coupé.

Viscous steering

It works both ways. Some words of aesthetic advice, though: avoid the carbon-fibre garnishment in the cabin. It's too boy-racer and the aluminium alternative is better. Same goes for the optional contrasting stitching on the leather, which just looks cluttered. This lily requires no gilding.

Any faults? Yes, the steering feels a little viscous at low speeds, before freeing up at high speeds. There might be an issue with a rubber grommet through which the steering column passes and the engineers are looking at it.

And there's a loud, insistent, electronic and needless beep whenever you kill the engine. They're looking at that, too. But neither snag, nor even the rock-concert aural bombardment, stops this being the best convertible in the world. - The Independent, London

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