Lapping ​​​​​​It Up

With The New 488 Pista Based Largely On Race Car Technology, Ferrar I Has Made One Angry Track Fiend That Comes With Protection

- Dejan Jovan Ovic

 It’s easy to become jaded without context. With it, even easier. You step into another million-horsepower V8 twin-turbocharged caricature — gaping grille, enormous wheels, carbon fibre reinforced plastic rear bumper with grand ambitions of being a diffuser — and you wield two tonnes of excess with not a scant regard for self-preservation.  

That’s the car’s job anyway, keeping you alive. This pedal makes it go, this one makes it stop, and a squared-off steering wheel (for knee clearance, so that your Nomex doesn’t rub on the Alcantara…) makes it turn. Feel? Nah. You can have some 12.3-inch screens though. Yes, lots of today’s sportscars, while never better, have forgotten most of what they once knew about pure driving fun. It’s the age of more, where a bigger number is always the right answer.

This horsepower war never did much good for anybody, except sales. Meanwhile neglected driving enthusiasts are left to asking themselves whether the Porsche 996 really was all that ugly. Hindsight does wonders for used car values.

There is almost no such thing as a bargain any more. With diluted performance cars full of electronics and weight in new car showrooms, even relatively recent stuff is starting to be priced out of reach of most of us, instead of just depreciating into my arms. Some complained about the hydraulic steering in the E92M3, but it would probably be best in class today. What, a decade later?

So while they wage war in marketing departments from Affalterbach to Zuffenhausen (it’s an A to Z analogy — don’t mind the fact the two towns are only minutes apart), driving enthusiasts are left unsatisfied, forced to rummage for MX-5s and Toyota 86s. Even hot hatchbacks went to the front — 300 horsepower just gets you started. A Focus RS weighs 1.6-tonnes.