Destinations: France, Gascony: home of Armagnac
27 February 2024
Auctions: Surrealist art in Paris
5 March 2024A transport of delight
Combining gutsy performance with interior elegance and engineering genius, Ferrari’s eye-catching GTC4Lusso is an all-round winner.
A total and utter joy. Without missing anything unnecessary that would help you, the reader, assess the overall experience of driving Ferrari’s GTC4Lusso or, indeed, determining whether or not to purchase it, I could simply copy and paste those initial five words 200 times to fill my 1,000-word allocation.
But review the car properly I must and so here I go.
It was a snowy day in Swindon when I was introduced to this prancing beauty. As the garage door rose, squeaking in protest at the incoming Arctic blast, my immediate desire was to forsake my original destination and, instead, head to Chamonix. For that’s what the Lusso feels designed for. Four-wheel drive, four seats and, notably (for Ferrari), a capacious luggage compartment whispered into my ear that the French Alps were certainly a preferential endpoint than my home near Stansted Airport.
The GTC4Lusso is a completely reworked FF which, let’s be honest, was not a universally popular Ferrari. The body shape is still the shooting brake of its ancestor and it is astonishingly large at first glance, but surprisingly navigable through the tight and twisty lanes of rural England. No major aesthetic redesign here although the rear fascia is sharper, with new taillights included.
Step inside the cabin and you feel yourself cocooned by finely stitched, luxury leather. This is where you will spend far more time than outside looking in. The seats have a lumbar-gripping sportiness, but are sufficiently padded that you don’t feel like you have to lose weight to make yourself comfortable. The steering wheel is still squared off as per recent Ferrari models and, while this doesn’t appeal to everyone, I rather like it.
The instrument layouts are more ergonomic than in the 488 Spider I drove last year with a more logical rotary dial for the wipers and more accessible indicator buttons. The gear change paddles are also reassuringly large, definitive and, to my mind, perfectly sited on the steering column rather than on the wheel itself.
The infotainment system is also a marked upgrade on the previous iteration. A 10.25-inch integrated touchscreen in the middle of the centre console has superb definition and easy navigation although I’m still not a fan of touchscreens as a rule as fat fingers and British roads could have you 50 miles away from your destination before you’re able to amend your clumsiness. The talkative lady in the satnav can be quietened, but she does take some finding before being persuaded to take a break.
The Lusso is all about the driving experience – and, as an experience, it truly is superb
Adding the secondary passenger infotainment screen seems like double overkill to me, though. As a lovely idiosyncrasy I can see its appeal, but the central screen itself is easily accessible to the passenger. The second part of the overkill is that said passenger will find it too easy to change the music away from your particular taste.
A car that, to my mind, comes with a soft focus and Debussy soundtrack (despite the V12 up front), does not deserve the randomness of passenger experimentation with thrash metal disturbing your journey.
With the central touchscreen requiring close physical motor skills to navigate, you’ll have to find a spot to park up, change the aural entertainment (and berate your guest) before the strains of Clair de Lune waft over you again.
Finally, in the interior, we come to two things that I think were designed to be always together. The second row of seating is adequate, comfortable and sufficient for an average-to-large full-grown adult.
That’s as it should be of course, but pair it with the panoramic glass roof (an £11,500 option!) and the rear passenger experience is something quite beyond special, incorporating views of the skies, mountains, clouds and, in my case, falling snow. Specially treated Low-E glass is technologically advanced and keeps the warmth in when cold outside and vice versa.
The GTC4Lusso, however, really is all about the driving experience – and, as an experience, it truly is superb. I wasn’t sure what to expect and tried to temper my imagination. A four-wheel drive, four-wheel steering, four-seater from Maranello? I didn’t drive the FF from which this evolved but, by all accounts, that wasn’t exactly an unqualified success.
The graduated torque curve doesn’t allow you the full 680bhp until high up in the rev range which means you actually have to drive the GTC4Lusso to get the most out of it. But that’s surely how it’s meant to be – a driver’s car should be driven
The V12 6.3-litre 680bhp naturally aspirated lump under the bonnet ahead of you is an engineering beauty. More civilised than you might imagine, it has been tuned to be quieter on ignition so as not to disturb the wildlife if you fancy a spin at 3am. The double-glazed glass of the cabin means you lose some of that essential ‘Ferrari-ness’ of the soundtrack, but just drop the window and in it floods.
The car is beautifully responsive too. The graduated torque curve doesn’t allow you the full 680bhp until high up in the rev range which means you actually have to drive the GTC4Lusso to get the most out of it. But that’s surely how it’s meant to be – a driver’s car should be driven.
Most of the time, though, it’s enough to know that the power and capacity are there should you ever need them. It’s highly unlikely you will ever explore the outer edges of the Lusso’s capabilities. The 0-62mph time of 3.4 seconds will remain words written in the brochure.
Between the engine and the wheels is where it gets really clever and comes with the whiff of engineering genius. I will try and explain it, but please forgive me if I fall short. The GTC4 is front-engined, but the power plant is located so far back in the chassis that two gearboxes can be accommodated.
The front wheels are driven through a two-speed gearbox with a wet slipping clutch for each wheel. The slipping clutches allow the front wheels to turn relative to the rears.
The lower gear on the front gearbox handles first and second on the rear seven-speed dual-clutch automatic transaxle gearbox and the higher gear, third and fourth. Once the rear gearbox climbs into fifth and beyond the GTC4 automatically slides into rear-wheel drive only. As the top of fourth gear is reached around 120mph, four-wheel drive would thereby become redundant.
The beauty of the engine mounting and the heavier rear gearbox means a lovely weight distribution differential of 6 per cent (47 per cent front; 53 per cent rear). This makes the car feel solidly planted and, adding the four-wheel steering into the mix makes it far more nimble than such a big beast has any right to expect.
The additional steering is not in the slightest bit intrusive with only around four degrees of travel but that, allied to the long wheelbase, made the Lusso feel much smaller and more sprightly than you might imagine. Indeed, the steering was actually more noticeable by its absence when I stepped into other cars not thus equipped.
And into other cars I must step. Having five days with the Ferrari GTC4Lusso was a pleasure and, come the autumn, I will be driving the two-wheel drive V8 variation. I really can’t wait.
‘Some people like a motorbike, some say “a tram for me,”’ sang Michael Flanders and Donald Swann in 1956 in the opening lines of a song marvelling at the magnificence of the London double-decker bus. Lauding the ‘97-horsepower omnibus’ as the ‘monarch of the road’ the song, A Transport of Delight, concluded with the giggled line: ‘Hold very tight please!’
Well, there’s a new monarch of the road: the Ferrari GTC4Lusso. And a worthy ruler it is.