Going Nuts

FERRARI HAS TAKEN THE SUBLIME 488 AND MADE AN EVEN BETTER SUPERCAR OUT OF IT. WE CANE MARANELLO’S MOST POWERFUL V8-POWERED CAR AROUND FIORANO.

- Gautam Sharma

It’s sheer violence. But not as in a herd of elephants trampling over a marauding lion. This is a strike of surgical precision. It’s Mohammad Ali dismantling George Foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle. An Exocet locking onto its target and relentlessly hunting it down.

Ferrari’s 488 Pista is the ultimate embodiment of Maranello’s 488 GTB mid-engined V8 supercar, and it’s devouring the company’s Fiorano test track at a rate that scarcely seems imaginable in a road car. I’m riding shotgun with Ferrari test and development driver Raffaele de Simone, and he’s got the 710bhp brute (a pre-production prototype) dancing at all sorts of laugh-out-loud angles across the short (2.997km) yet highly technical track.

Soon after, I’m strapped into the four-point harness behind the wheel, and blasting out of the pits, the first impression is of the monumental oomph of the 3.9-litre twin-turbo V8 (it’s Ferrari’s most potent eight-cylinder motor to date). I’ll get into all the nitty-gritty of the powerplant shortly, but for now just take in these numbers: 0-100kph in 2.85sec and 0-200kph in 7.6sec. That’s within sniffing distance of the ridiculously rapid Bugatti Chiron (0-200kph in 6.5sec), which has more than double the power and costs more than eight times as much. Staggering.

The Pista’s straight-line grunt is plain gobsmacking (it would leave a Lambo Huracan Performante for dead in a drag), but this is only one small facet of a car that has been honed to the nth degree to shave every last tenth off its lap times. Yet, the Pista does all this without sacrificing everyday drivability at pootling speeds on normal roads — this becomes evident on a 30-minute loop out of Fiorano Modenese and into the nearby hills, where the tarmac is narrow and bumpy.