Ferrari LaFerrari

This is the first Ferrari flagship that Pininfarina did not draw. Ferrari ran nine design studies in 2011, cut them to five in April of that year, three from its own Centro Stile and two from Pininfarina, and then chose between the two remaining in-house proposals. Flavio Manzoni had been running Ferrari Design since 2010 and this is the car that established it as the company's own studio rather than a coordinating office. What came out is aerodynamic before it is anything else. The nose is low and split by a deep central intake, the flanks are scooped hard into the rear wheels, and active surfaces at both ends move to keep the balance without the driver being told. The greenhouse is small, the tail is almost entirely open around the diffuser, and the whole shape is drawn to move air rather than to flatter itself in a showroom. Two full-size prototypes survive from the process and are worth knowing about: the LaFerrari Concept Manta and the LaFerrari Concept Tensostruttura, kept at the Maranello and Abu Dhabi museums.

The LaFerrari never raced, and unlike the F50 there was no cancelled programme behind it. Ferrari's competition money sits in Formula 1 and in customer GT racing, where the entries in these years were 458 and then 488 based cars built to GT2 and GT3 rules. A 963PS hybrid with a carbon tub fitted nothing, and Ferrari never pretended otherwise. What it got instead was the FXX-K, the third car in Ferrari's XX development programme after the FXX and the 599XX. Forty were built from 2015, track-only and never road registered, unveiled at Yas Marina at the end of 2014. The K is for kinetic energy recovery, and the specification is what the road car might have been with no rules at all: 1,050PS from an 860PS V12 and a 190PS motor, over 900Nm, 1,165kg dry, and 540kg of downforce at 200km/h. In October 2017 the FXX-K Evo package added 23 percent more downforce again, which is 75 percent more than the road car makes. Owners do not race them. They run them at Ferrari events with factory engineers reading the telemetry, which is a development programme wearing a customer's clothes.

The LaFerrari's cultural weight comes less from screens than from who was allowed to have one. Ferrari's selection process turned buying the car into a public question, and the answers were unusually blunt. Being famous counted for nothing, factory visits counted for nothing, and two well-known collectors, David Lee and Preston Henn, were both turned down for Apertas, with Henn going to law to try to find out why. Very few cars have generated a lawsuit about not being sold. Then there is the name. LaFerrari means The Ferrari, and it landed badly enough that a decade of enthusiast argument has failed to produce an alternative anybody uses. Ferrari has never softened it. The two charity cars are the part that will outlast the rest. Ferrari built an extra coupé after the run of 499 ended and sold it at Daytona in December 2016 for $7,000,000 towards rebuilding central Italy after the earthquakes; the last Aperta made €8,300,000 for Save the Children the following September. Hublot built 60 MP-05 tourbillons alongside the car, with a fifty-day power reserve from eleven barrels.

The LaFerrari is the most usable car Ferrari has put at the top of this family, and it has one dependency that nothing else in the lineage has. The hybrid pack does not like standing. Ferrari quoted one owner $195,000 to replace one, and there is no established aftermarket alternative, so the practical answer has become cell-level repair: the Croatian specialists at EV Clinic took on a car showing 1,440km with a manufacturing assembly defect and a failed cell and rebuilt the pack against a €180,000 quote. That is the whole ownership question in one line. Keep it charged, keep it moving, and the car behaves like a modern Ferrari. Park it in a collection for five years and you may be buying the most expensive battery in the hobby. Everything else is ordinary for the class. The carbon tub does not corrode and cannot be casually repaired. Carbon-ceramic brakes last a long time and cost accordingly when they do not. The three recall campaigns are all documented and all were done free. And the V12 itself, the part that will still be worth something in fifty years, is the least troublesome thing on the car.