Ferrari F8 Tributo 2019 Review

Can’t see a thing outside the cockpit of the Ferrari F8 Tributo. The Apennine mountain passes have been rendered guesswork, with a sponge of fog re-enveloping the sleek shape the instant it passes, giving a free wind-tunnel data set for anybody brave enough to follow closely.

I have Ferrari’s newest mainstay in its Sport mode, with the dampers running softly to soak up the bumps and the slick surface. And then, unseen, we hit it. The crest drops away like a crater’s edge even as the car is still cornering, under full power.

In a normal rear-drive car this means the sort of trouble only competition-standard drivers catch, with the back-end spitting sideways before most skid-control systems could catch it. It would still be a significant scare in an all-wheel drive car.

A Ferrari F8 Tributo shrugs it off with just a tiny downtick of its V8 soundtrack, and then rockets forward again. No histrionics. No heart-in-the-mouth. No fatalities.

All this, and it still gains in speed, ripping to 100km/h in 2.9 seconds and from zero to 200km/h in 7.8 seconds, all the way to 340km/h at its top-end. It’s only a second slower, Ferrari claims, than the hard-core 488 Pista version of its predecessor around its own Fiorano test track.

That’s the beauty of the F8 Tributo. It isn’t that Ferrari made it faster than the 488 GTB – a car it is effectively a facelift of. That car, after all, was plenty fast enough for mortals.

The beauty of the F8 Tributo absolutely is that it’s faster than the 488 GTB and it’s so much more fun to drive, more accessible, more intuitive and much friendlier in real-world trouble spots.

It’s like they always had the crazy curve all figured out and now they’ve finally filled in a lot of the sensible curve beneath it.

Sure, the McLaren 720S is a fraction quicker and the Lamborghini Hurucan is blessed with that engine and sound, but neither of them are the rounded, polished gem the Ferrari F8 Tributo has become.

How did they manage this from a 530kW beast of a thing with just 1330kg of dry weight to shove around? Well, that’s another story.

Ferrari already upgraded the 488 GTB once with the harder-edged Pista. It seemed logial the F8 Tributo would simply score the Pista’s crankier powertrain, but it has all been taken further than that.

Firstly, there were some emissions-legislation thumbscrews to counter, so the engine needed new catalysts and a pair of particulate filters (which normally sap about 15 horsepower).

The filters sponged away some of the V8’s vocal gymnastics so Ferrari ran a hot-tube resonator down-gas from one of the turbos, through the rear pillar and into the cabin just behind the driver, just so there’s an amplified natural sound.

It didn’t stop replacing things until, Ferrari estimated, half the 488 GTB’s engine parts had gone.

Now the engine has 50 additional horsepower, another 10Nm and it’s 18kg lighter than the 488 GTB’s motor – and that from a motor that won the International Engine of the Year award five times.

From 3902ccc, the motor delivers 530kW of power at 7000rpm, but 770Nm of torque from 3250rpm, and it still revs out to 8000rpm.

One of the biggest changes is the move to a one-piece Inconel exhaust manifold that saves 9.7kg by itself and also gives each of the two turbos its own real-time speed sensor.

There are plenty of Pista pieces here, including the stronger titanium alloy connecting rods (43 per cent lighter than before), the new crankshaft (1.2kg lighter), the flywheel (1.5kg lighter) and Ferrari even found 0.3kg in the valvetrain.

It didn’t pluck stuff only out of the Pista, with the air intake system pulled from the 488 Challenge racer too.

So it’s not only fast, but it’s so much lighter (17 per cent) inside that it reacts to the accelerator pedal with think-it-quick power delivery.

It also breathes air that’s about 15 degrees cooler in the plenum chamber, after a few fiddles to the airflow along its flanks.

It hooks the V8 up to a mega-slick seven-speed dual-clutch transmission that’s soft enough to use every day and hard-core enough for track days, even with dedicated hard-core drivers.

Aerodynamics isn’t about reducing drag, necessarily. They’re about reducing lift for a minimal drag cost, which is why Ferrari has long been reluctant to slap rear wings on things like Porsche does.

So the Ferrari F8 Tributo scores an F-derived S-duct, just like it had on the Pista, to pull air from near ground level up through a hole behind the bumper and out over the bonnet. It’s good for 15 per cent more downforce for no drag cost at all.

There’s a blown rear diffuser at the back, which delivers a quarter of the upgrade, and it has adaptive flaps that are electronically controlled depending on speed, load and direction changes, while repackaged front radiators, diffusers and underbody vortex generators make up the rest.

Ferrari claims the extra power meant the V8 had eight per cent more heat to dissipate, which would have meant a 25 per cent increase in radiator size. So it rejigged the packaging of the forward-tilted radiators, laying them flatter and instead making them just two per cent larger.

Now the F8 Tributo has five per cent less drag for 10 per cent more overall downforce.

There have also been upgrades to the side-slip control (accessed by a simple flick of the steering wheel-mounted dial) that lets the driver hurl out the most lurid slides possible without spinning, thanks to a combination of torque vectoring and stability control.

It can work in both Race and CT-off modes, with Ferrari estimating it lets the F8 Tributo punch out of corners six per cent harder than before.

Then there are the weight savings, with Ferrari’s first lightweight Lexan louvred rear screen since the F40, pulling it down to 1435 wet kilos or 1330kg dry. Optional carbon-fibre alloy wheels chop another 10kg from the overall weight.

And here are two critical tweaks: the braking and steering systems have been overhauled for added fun, rather than added power or speed. And that’s a very un-Ferrari thing to do.

The servo booster grows in diameter and shrinks in stroke, all to add in pedal feel and progression, while the steering wheel’s diameter shrinks.

The Ferrari F8 Tributo is brilliant, in every facet, in every condition. And we experienced some pretty horrendous conditions.

Firstly, it looks awesome. It shares the entire glasshouse and doors of the 488 GTB (and the F458 Italia) and from that the in-house design team bent around aerodynamic demands more than Pininfarina ever bothered with.

The 488 GTB lost much of the F458’s delicate elegance when Ferrari took great lumps out of the sides to feed the turbochargers. That same slight inelegance carries over here, though the added aggression and purpose of the S-ducted front end give it poise its predecessor didn’t quite have.

The rear-end, too, is more carefully crafted and sculpted, showing hints of the F355 (and, it must be said, a little Lotus Evora) at the rear.

Then there are those doors, with their low-down handles. And the entry is surprisingly easy, and manual seat control is the fast-car gift that keeps giving, allowing people to move the seats back quickly to get out.

The interior is essentially new, with new vents that feel a bit brittle, and a new touch-screen sliver for the passenger (which is a touch I’ve always loved) and new graphics for the instrument cluster.

It’s a simple matter to start the F8 Tributo. Just punch the big, red start button and hang on for a split second as the fuel pumps whir, then there’s a deep blat as the V8 catches, first time every time.

It’s a gloriously smooth and rich burble, with the turbos thankfully uninvolved at idle, then you pull the right-hand paddle to engage first gear and it’s away.

And for all the pace beneath the sleek skin, it can ease away with surprising delicacy. You could send your grandmother to the shops in it, assuming she understands there’s about a metre of very expensive front overhang to keep off the concrete walls.

It’s simple and calm and easy around town, soaking up bumps and undulations, climbing over speed bumps and with terrific forward vision making it a doddle at intersections.

It’s big torque curve helps, it can ease through life in its automatic mode or you can shift the gears yourself, but there’s always enough mid-range on offer to be lazy.

But the joy becomes unfettered with speed, and blasting away in launch control will fill the cabin with giggles of joy and absurdity. It’s terrifically ridiculous how fast this car is, with that V8 bellowing, then softening as the turbos take over.

The rear-end grips in a way that two tyres simply shouldn’t be able to, and hurling the gorgeous sculpture forward like a piece of ordinance.

It’s hard to grasp why anybody would feel the need to accelerate harder than this on a public road. It’s just savage inside the car, even if it doesn’t deliver the full torque load until seventh gear, springing to 8000rpm in a blink, only to do it again.

Keep pulling gears at full throttle and the acceleration never seems to dim, but the violence is something that you almost get used to and, beyond about 150km/h, you’re almost a bemused spectator waiting for the wave of urge to break on something or dissipate.

It doesn’t.

The engine is enormously enthusiastic for revs and work, and it spins so astonishingly freely that you wonder just how many revs it would take to blow the thing up.

Certainly, the 8000rpm cutout doesn’t challenge its engineering and it doesn’t feel much like 9000rpm would be a bother, either.

It still doesn’t spin with that glorious linearity of the 458’s last-dance-of-the-atmo-motors, and it doesn’t match that car’s noise, either, but it’s pretty good for a turbo motor and more enthusiastic than a 488 GTB.

The note seems to change all the time, but in a slightly tech-dominated way, from its low-end bellowing idle to its fizzing turbos around 3000rpm, to a metallic howl from 5000rpm all the way to the limiter.

The winding stuff is just as eye-popping, too, with each downshift coming with a sharp crack as the computer auto-blips the throttle on the way down the box.

For all that, the engine isn’t the highlight of the F8 Tributo. The highlight is how everything else about the car has evolved to keep that engine the sort of control that an average driver can exert.

It starts with the brakes, really. Carbon-ceramic by birth in all Ferraris, the brakes now have feel, rather than binary effectiveness, and you can use that at will, from easy stopping around town to delicate modulations down from 300km/h.

It’s firm enough that you can stand on it to haul things down, then roll gently off it to let the nose turn into a corner. Shrinking the wheel and dialling back the assistance levels have made the steering come alive in a way that only Porsche used to do, and now you can faithfully believe in every last scrap of grip the Ferrari has to give you.

This 458/488 family has always been about delicacy of balance, but now it’s about delicacy of feedback and trust, too, and it rewards you from the very first time you point it at an apex.

It’s very direct off-centre, but then it comes alive with feedback, allowing you to hit any apex you can put your eyes onto, encouraging you to lean more and more on the front, and to then transfer the weight to the rear to haul out again. And it does this with no intimidation or undue demands on your courage of skill.

It just does it, and you become more and more confident about it, even with the stability control switched off, and you can just soak up the poise.
It allows its drivers to express themselves, where earlier Ferrari V8s simply let the driver watch on as the car expressed itself, and it just feels natural in everything it does.

And that’s perhaps Ferrari’s greatest achievement with the F8 Tributo. It has made the car so good that it simply lives to make its drivers look – and feel – good.

How much does the 2020 Ferrari F8 Tributo cost?
Price: $484,888 (plus on-road costs)
Available: First quarter 2020
Engine: 3.9-litre twin-turbo petrol V8
Output: 530kW/770Nm
Transmission: Seven-speed dual-clutch
Fuel: 10.9L/100km (WLTP)
CO2: 292g/km (WLTP)
Safety Rating: Not tested