Ferrari unveils its fastest road car ever in Australia

Ferrari has staged the Australian debut of its fastest ever road model just a few kilometres away from the glamour of the Australian International Motor Show.

The Prancing Horse's local distributor European Automotive Imports hosted media and customer launches for the F12berlinetta at its main showroom in Sydney’s Waterloo this week, kicking off a series of intimate events in capital cities across the country to introduce prospective buyers to its new V12 flagship.

The company is already taking orders for the car and first deliveries arrive Down Under in June-July 2013.  However, it's not saying how many F12s have been sold in Australia and the waiting list has stretched out already to about 18 months.

On first glance at the figures, Ferrari appears to have joined the hypercompetitive mass-market throng in getting a better product to market at a lower price.

Sort of, anyway. A sticker price of $691,100 plus on-road costs is hardly a snip. But in the language specific to this rarefied stratum of the auto market, it’s quite the bargain. The F12 comes in well under the $807,000 599 GTO, the top-spec variant of the model it replaces. That means you can fit a Porsche Boxster into the margin. And it’s better in every way, including much, much faster.

The F12 is a car full of paradoxes. While it’s more compact outside than the 599 – shorter, narrower, smaller in the wheelbase – it’s bigger inside through every dimension. While major aerodynamic improvements cut the drag coefficient by 11 per cent to 0.29, they also manage a massive improvement in downforce, up 76 per cent overall, extending to 94 per cent at 200km/h.

All this in a car which weighs up to 70kg less than its predecessor. While the standard spec car starts at 1630kg, a suite of weight reduction options can pare it down as low as 1525kg. By mounting the engine well behind the front axle and the transmission down the back, Ferrari has optimised weight distribution 46:54 front-to-rear.

Long-time bodybuilding partner Scaglietti (now owned by Ferrari) has come good with a raft of new construction methods Ferrari says are industry firsts, including the replacement of rivets and glue with welds connecting different materials. The result is a claimed 20 per cent increase in structural rigidity to go with the weight reduction.

It shares some of its fundamentals with sibling models – some 458 chassis essentials, the FF’s 6.3-litre V12. We wondered how much such apparent production efficiencies might account for the performance-for-price hike. Is Maranello going the way of the parts-bin sharers downmarket? Decidedly not, Ferrari's Australian general manager Kevin Wall replied – and a good deal of the presentation supported this, emphasising the immensity of the R&D effort required to make this the most advanced Ferrari ever to reach the roads. “No, you can put it down to exchange rates, I think.”

Make no mistake, this is a totally unique package, with differences extending to the internal aerodynamics of the engine – yes, you read that right. At 537kW/690Nm, the powerplant is well up on the FF’s 486kW/683Nm. And it’s punting up to 250kg less around as well, partly thanks to its RWD configuration and traditional coupe body style, against the FF’s Ferrari-first AWD layout and wagon-esque body.

As always, it needs plenty of revs to find peak power and torque, but 80 per cent of that monstrous 690 Newtons comes on from just 2500rpm. With help from a F1-derived close-ratio seven-speed DCT configured for the purpose, the F12 turns on what the company describes as “an unrelenting surge” of acceleration from the moment the pedal goes down to its 8500rpm redline.

The F12 cuts a massive 0.6 seconds off the base-spec 599 and the FF’s shared 0-100km/h sprint time, down from 3.7 (3.35 for the GTO) to 3.1 seconds. More importantly in Ferrari’s language, showing up as it does the car’s full capabilities, it cuts more than three seconds off the outgoing model’s lap time of the company’s Fiorano test track, from 1:26.50 (1:24 for the GTO) to 1:23. Top speed, claims Ferrari, is “over 340km/h”.

All that and it ushers in a 16 per cent overall improvement in fuel efficiency over its predecessor. Combined-cycle consumption of 15.0L/100km with CO2 emissions of 350g/km put it up round the top of the supercar class. Ferrari has used these improvements to reduce the size of the fuel tank without compromising range. They’ve also tuned it for Europe’s standard 95 RON fuel, putting an end to complaints about its need for costlier 98 RON.

The most dramatic visual feature of the joint Ferrari-Pininfarina design is its “aero bridge” – great big vents atop each front fender that channel air off to each side of the bonnet and out the sides, beneath the A-pillars and out along those great Nike-swoosh side creases. They effectively create a vacuum above the front-end of the car, with the resultant inflow of air forcing the front end down – a kind of reversal of the way an aircraft’s wing--flaps work to suck it off the ground during take-off.

Less obvious but no less influential on performance is the car’s active brake cooling system, which uses sensors to open small flaps on the front corners, inviting a rush of air in when it gets uncomfortably hot in its carbon-ceramic anchors. The result is a win-win, with the F12 recording dramatic reductions in stopping distances over its predecessor while keeping drag to a minimum by closing the flaps at normal operating temperatures.

The F12 will do no harm for the marque at a time when things are (kind of) tough in the local supercar segment.

Sales in the $500K-plus segment are down 15-20 per cent year-on-year, so Mr Wall is happy the marque is merely maintaining its market share of about 30 per cent. That will translate into sales of 100-115 cars this year, with V12 models accounting for about a third. There’s good money in that, especially with a sizeable proportion of cars leaving the showroom laden with costly options.

EAI's numbers suggest it has reason to be happy with the way things have gone since assuming the franchise in 2005. Old Ferraris tend to stick around a long time, so most of the 2000 or so sold in Australia over six decades are still alive. EAI has delivered around 1000 of those cars in just seven years.

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