Gadgetory

this is one of those days and I'm surprised they paint with me is Ferraris ultimate street car ever the laferrari following in the lineage of the f40 the f50 the Enzo they only do one of these about every 10 or 12 years they're very special leaders very limited you don't just show up in Lodi with a million and a half dollar cheque and take one home you have to own some Ferraris important ones at that and then they made a in to sell you one of these and when you do bring it home you've got something more than the latest ultimate Ferrari you've got the first one in my estimation to jump fully with both feet into the 21st century this car is important the styling of laferrari was actually done in-house at Ferrari which is actually notable after 50 60 some odd years of having Pininfarina and almost all of their cars but what's happening here is really interesting there's not that much left for a stylist to do in the modern supercar era the shape is determined by how the car functions in the wind there are almost more holes and ports and cutouts than there is positive mass what you're seeing here is a carbon-fiber skin drawn tight over the least amount of guts the car has been and of course this is Ferraris first Street hybrid it's called hikers technology hybrid kinetic energy recovery system it actually dates back to 2009 and f1 didn't take that many years for it to hit the street when you've got something this pretty you don't hide it and they don't here's the heart of the beast starting with a 6.3 liter naturally aspirated v12 underneath this enormous carbon-fiber plenum is some banned in f1 technology variable-length intake runners it allows you to have the engine run perfectly at any rpm range by varying the run from intake to the cylinder which doesn't want to always be the same and in this car it isn't then you get to the more modern stuff this is the HP you the hybrid power unit which brings in power from the batteries and sends it on down to the electric motor right down there bolted on the tail end of the transmission up here you see some of the orange cabling that's a dead giveaway this car is electrified it leads up to batteries that live behind the two front seats down and low and they each live in their own little hermetically sealed refrigerators this electric apparatus weighs over 300 pounds so it better earn its keep and it does contributing a hundred and sixty three horsepower to the massive combined 950 and the best hundred and forty-seven of the total 664 pound-feet of torque as a result of the electric componentry back here the traditional engine up here does need to worry quite so much about being a torque motor it can do more with breathing at high rpm hence redline is 92 50 and the low-end stuff is brought in by the electrics where does it all go interestingly and against current fashion it goes to two wheels only in the back while other supercars are going all-wheel drive this one plants it in just two places through a 7-speed dual-clutch transmission Ferrari is outstanding f1 gearboxes now in addition to using carbon fiber on the outside you've got a clear message of carbon fiber on the inside cuz this is a carbon fiber cabin tub it only weighs 150 pounds the actual shell I'm sitting in part of how they kept the weight down is keeping it small as you can probably also see by having these seats actually be immovable there's a stationary vengence they were able to make the cabin smaller because you didn't have to leave room for the seat track to move back and forth instead you adjust the wheel and the pedals back here is an LCD instrument panel not their first but in this case it's changeable it has different modes that is a first for Ferrari you've got a more traditional tack centric look and then you've got one that more speaks to the fact this is an electrified car with a centre roundel that has different indications of whether you're regenerating or expending electric power here's a real crowd-pleaser this sort of carbon-fiber bat weighing down here as your drive controls reverse automatic and launch control the last little trick is over here behind this door here's a USB slot that is different from the one for media and communications this one holds a memory drive is going to pick up recording of video from the forward-looking camera behind the mirror and this one over here in this trick little carbon fiber pod that's watching the driver it puts those two together and records them as you make your laps let's say I'm on the track in the wet and a 900-plus horseman don't tell my life insurance agent one of the first things you notice in this car is the fact that it doesn't present a huge amount of hybrid Ness there aren't a whole bunch of electric modes there isn't that electric boost button like you have on a p1 this is a car that really buries the hybrid part but buries it under the accelerator it is in fact what you would call technically a mild parallel hybrid but of course there is nothing mild about the results now to mortals like us all supercars feel the same in one respect they are all much more than you can exploit but what do I find distinctive about this car it's really a joy to drive at your limits invoking more grins and less sweat and weather on the track or on the street asking you sacrifice very little in terms of livability Oh while making you feel like a superhero okay now when you're driving a car and by the way it's someone else's car that goes for about $8,000 an inch slice you're glad for certain technologies to keep it under control first of all Ferraris remarkable stability control this lovely DCT transmission is it's perfect there's absolutely nothing about it in tractors street that I don't like big ol carbon ceramic brakes are of course like driving a nail through this thing when you need it to but you also get some nice breaking through regen going back into the motor that's classic hybrid stuff but also when the engines got too much torque cooking like like I'm in this turn it'll convert some of that into power back in and as you can see all around this car you've got active flex and slots behind me the most fascinating giant emerging wing and auto-tune pricing a laferrari doesn't matter it's about a million and a half or so and you can do endless personalization to take it where you want the real story in conclusion here is that if you're lucky enough to own or just drive one of these you've tapped into a lot of technologies and design ethic that are the future of Ferrari but also a supercar that is a joy to drive not just a hellacious hammer on the track few supercars can pull off that balancing act this one does for cars driven CNET style standing by now at CNET on cars.com click on the road