Ferrari Portofino 2018 Review - International

Conquistador

Regardless of what the critics say, the California T convertible was at least a limited success for Ferrari. Seven of every 10 California buyers had never owned a Ferrari before, which is a healthy conquest rate.

Yet regardless of what its Ferrari says, the California T's daily-driver goals of comfort, flexibility and accessibility meant it wasn't ever going to be seen by the tifosi as a proper Ferrari. They never gave it a chance to be.

Both things are true at the same time, and somewhere between these two extreme views is the path the new Portofino has to find.

It starts well, even before you open a door, with new folding-roof technologies allowing it to host a far more sports-car shape than the three-box California.

Its proportions are more balanced, its boot height lower and the rear roof angle shallower and sleeker.

There's something of the 575 Maranello about its rear haunches (Ferrari claims it resembles the Daytona, but we disagree) and it runs perilously close to being better looking with the roof up than it does with the roof down.

The body boasts all manner of aero tricks, most of which aren't obvious to the naked eye. The exception is the angled, tubular cut behind the front wheels that extracts hot and turbulent air from around the wheels, and also breaks up what would have otherwise been a long, plain panel.

Other stuff includes air breathers to cool the front carbon-ceramic brakes, another air guide around the outside of the L-shaped headlights and a large diffuser under its four-exhaust tail.

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Ferrari-fast

It's clearly fast enough to wear a Prancing Horse on its steering wheel, bellowing to 100km/h in 3.5 seconds and crunching through 200km/h in 10.8 seconds before running out of acceleration at somewhere claimed to be just beyond 320km/h.

Everything about its chassis and suspension engineering is new, but it retains the same basic footprint of the outgoing car, including the bigger metal bits of the 3.9-litre twin-turbo V8 and seven-speed dual-clutch transmission.

But there are ranges of "same" at play here. The carry-over engine block uses new aluminium pistons and connecting rods and a slight upgrade of the flat-plane crank, but the biggest hardware upgrade has been the slimming down of the three-piece, welded exhaust manifold for a single-piece sand-cast unit.

Twin-turbo V8s of about this capacity in this ilk of car live in the engine bays of BMWs, Mercedes-AMGs and Audis, but the Portofino stands out for more than just its red engine paint.

The Germans prefer to put their turbochargers inside the engine's vee angle, while Ferrari clings to the old-school ways, hanging the IHI twin-scroll turbos on the outside of the cylinder-heads.

The airflow has been considerably cleaned up, according to Ferrari, giving it a smoother induction path and a clearer, straighter exhaust path. The intercoolers are lighter and angled, the exhaust pipes have larger diameters and closed-loop electronic 'loud' flap control and the mapping is all new.

It punches out 441kW of power at 7500rpm and, while it peaks at 760Nm of torque between 3000 and 5250rpm, Ferrari follows its own logic by only delivering it in seventh gear.

It adjusts the maximum torque in every other gear in an effort to limit wheelspin. It's a 29kW jump from the California T, but torque is only 5Nm more.

It retains the seven-speed dual-clutch transmission and scores the latest generation of Ferrari's electronically-controlled differential, the E-Diff3.

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Chassis redesign

The springs are stiffer at all four corners and it also scores metal-filled fluid in the dampers to make them magnetically variable in their responses.

For the first time in history, the Portofino mates a Ferrari with electric power steering, which is the first clear hint that everything in the chassis is new.

There are other tricks. Instead of the flat plastic undertray, there's now an aluminium undertray that's a fully stressed member, contributing to the 35 per cent rise in stiffness.

Ferrari claims it's 80kg lighter than the California T, partly thanks to a 30 per-cent reduction in weld length throughout the car.

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Inside line

But most Portofino buyers won't care so much about the details. They'll be more interested in the improvements in the all-new interior.

There isn't a fully digital instrument cluster, though the traditional central tacho is flanked by two 5.0-inch digital displays. It makes for a busy dash, especially if you're keeping an eye on the speedo as well.

For an extra fee, the passenger can also get a compacted strip of a digital instrument cluster on the dash, which is, surprisingly, more intuitive to use and change than the driver's.

In the middle of the dash sits a 10.3-inch touch-screen display that looks a lot like an upside-down BMW dash-top infotainment screen. It goes beyond navigation (which it does far better than before), and has a host of digital consoles for its configurable systems.

Ferrari makes a big thing of talking about the new magnesium-framed seats giving 5cm of legroom to the rear-seat passengers, which doesn't say a whole lot of positive things about what they had to work with before.

They're even less comfortable with the smaller, lighter wind-blocker in place, and the car is a calmer, less turbulent place to be with the roof down than the California.

The roof drops or raises in 14 seconds at up to 40km/h, which makes it more versatile than its predecessor, and it's a single button to operate it either way.

The seats are far easier to climb into than they are in a 488, and the leatherwork is impressive, even though the shutlines and joins lack the crispness of an AMG or an Audi Sport model.

It's surprisingly comfortable, even sitting still. There's little to fault with the driving position, with the seat reasonably straight on, the steering wheel adjustments effective and the pedals well placed.

The only occasional hiccup is Ferrari's adherence to steering column-mounted gearshift paddles, which rise high but stop about halfway down the wheel, so you're sometimes grabbing air trying to pull a gear.

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Behind the wheel

The engine fires up in a quiet rumble. There is always the feeling that a highly stressed beast of a thing lurks down in the depths of the throttle travel, with a slight rasp and hiss filtering the mechanical furore in its default Comfort mode.

Stomp the throttle in Sport mode, however, and it's a completely different story. Ferrari insists it tuned the sound in three phases: Bass for low revs, Tenor over 2500-5000rpm and Soprano above that.

It's got the second two pretty well nailed, rising with surprising progression for a turbo motor until it's screaming ferociously at 7500rpm, but the Bass needs work.

Too often, at light throttle work around town, its sound isn't the stuff of fable, threatening to awaken long-dead gods of racing, but sounds more like cows lowing simultaneously into dairy shed feed tins.

Ordinarily, on a car like a 488, that's not going to be a problem because low revs are something to touch fleetingly on the way to parts of the rev range that are more fun.

On the Portofino, its everyday drive-to-work philosophy makes it a whole lot more critical. This, unlike any other Ferrari, is the part of the rev range people will live in most often.

The other questionable area is the steering. Ferrari claims it delivers more feedback than ever before, but experience tells us not even Porsche has EPS nailed yet, though it's getting closer all the time.

There is a rider on all of this, and that concerns the roads that were used for the launch which were, frankly, shit. Dotted with long urban areas and broken road surfaces with very little grip, the handful of corners we could find to explore the Portofino's chassis weren't ideal for this kind of work.

It may well be that better roads bring out better steering performance from the Ferrari, but it's still lacking the relaxed zone around the straight-ahead that marks the great highway runners.

The steering is accurate and intuitive when you're pushing the car, though, and helps the driver to helm the Ferrari calmly and lightly around town, with just enough heft in every situation.

Similarly, the hamstringing of the torque output in the early gears doesn't hurt and probably helps. It has no holes in its delivery, with short early gears helping it to hurl itself into traffic gaps briskly and to blast into the middle distance with incredible enthusiasm.

The Portofino's gearshift is also brilliant, snapping crisply in Comfort mode and sharply in Sport. The only downside we found is that the noise of downshift is far sexier from outside the car than inside it, with pops and crackles every time a car goes past.

Just don't worry so much about letting the car do its own gearshift thinking. It's more accurate if you use the paddles yourself.

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Supercar or GT?

It's also terrific at coping with lumpy roads. It has three different driving modes, which change the maps for the powertrain, suspension, skid control and steering, but the real clever part is the damper button on the steering wheel.

Push that and, whatever mode you're in, it will put the dampers into the softest mode, so you can push on hard and ride the bumps softly.

It's too firm in Sport on the surfaces we found, jittering and tense in its reactions to the world beneath it, which seemed in line with supercar positioning but at odds with its more GT pretensions.

Where it walks its best line between supercar and GT is in its handling. Its body control is so good that we could fling it into a series of corners with undue haste and the car hunkered down and blasted through, its exhaust bellowing off the stone walls around us.

It's immune to heavy handedness, relaxed with harsh inputs and comfortable with the roof up or down.

Its core conundrum is that it's a far better sports car than the California T was, with better handling, more grip, less visible skid control, greater vocal richness and linearity and a greater breadth of ability at its extremes.

Yet, on the roads we had to drive on, it didn't feel demonstrably better as a grand tourer, mainly due to fidgety highway steering and a lack of low-rev aural intrigue.

And surely, for a day-to-day driver, that's the part of the package that needed to take the big leap forward.

2018 Ferrari Portofino pricing and specifications:
Price: $399,888 (plus ORCs)
Engine: 3.9-litre twin-turbo petrol V8
Output: 441kW/760Nm
Transmission: Seven-speed dual-clutch
Fuel: 10.7L/100km (NEDC)
CO2: 245g/km (NEDC)
Safety rating: TBC