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Ferrari’s F8 Tributo has the essential ingredients to make a masterpiece. So is it flapjack or flopjack?
T he great COVID lockdown of 2020 / 2021 was onerous for many. What started as a couple of weeks of collective tedium morphed, inexorably, into a seeming never-ending series of Thursday clapping for brave NHS workers battling at the front line of a war against a deadly virus and a frank necessity of surveying the wreckage and detritus of our professional lives.
I say ‘onerous for many’ but obviously it wasn’t onerous for our foppish, inveterate liar of a prime minister (still in office at the time of writing, astonishingly) who seemingly couldn’t pass a ‘work gathering’ without opening a bottle and inviting his ‘friends’ to join him in a tipple despite the laws he passed against such occurrences. If this man had smelled so much as a wine gum he would probably have booked a disc jockey for the event.
I don’t have the space, time, inclination or crayons to explain sufficiently the emotional damage this moral midget did to society over the course of two difficult years. While the scared, poor and vulnerable were dying alone, with nary held hand nor kiss goodbye, Boris Johnson, a man with the ethical depth of a Saharan puddle and the integrity of a cardboard umbrella, was yucking it up in Downing Street and getting his minions to fall on their swords for him. Operation Save the Big Dog? Barking.
Meanwhile, to segue somewhat gratingly, there were positives to be had if you looked deeply enough. Northumberland Council, whose geographic responsibility includes the North Pennines, took the opportunity afforded to it to launch an ambitious road-resurfacing plan. Many of the B-roads in this rural idyll have been crumbling in recent years and have been long overdue more than simply a lick of white-line paint. However, given the remoteness of some of the routes, to close them for essential works would mean redirections so extensive you might have had to change time zones.
The lack of traffic though during the early summer of 2020 offered a golden opportunity to bring these routes into the 21st century and keep the workforce gainfully employed at a time when everyone was struggling. Let’s leave aside the cynical view that if a council doesn’t spend its entire budget it doesn’t get the same amount the following year and simply celebrate the fact that now, about as far from metropolitan centres as it’s possible to get, we have some of the best driving roads in England.
Ferrari [have an] admitted excellence at producing V8 mid-engined berlinettas over 40 years
Which brings me on to the F8 Tributo, Ferrari’s self-congratulatory homage to itself and its admitted excellence at producing V8 mid-engined berlinettas over the preceding 40 years. With two electric vehicles coming soon from Maranello and, somewhat disturbingly, an SUV (the Purosangue – Italian for thoroughbred), maybe this is their acknowledgment of the end of pure internal combustion more generally. No-one at the factory will confirm this but they don’t deny it either.
The Tributo is billed as a replacement for the 488 GTB however, let’s face it, it’s essentially the same car (blended with more than a soupçon of the 488 Pista) but with a huge amount of facelift done before rubber met tarmac. It is, for me, something of an anomaly though. While I can respect the engineering utterly, I struggled to enjoy or even, really, to like this car. I hope this doesn’t put me out of the market for future Ferrari reviewing opportunities but this car struck me as just a corporate ego trip in undulating carbon fibre.
Let’s start at the good end of the scale with the engineering. The Tributo has married up the holy trinity of weight saving, extra power and more efficient aerodynamics well and now offer up an extra 50bhp underneath a car that’s 10% more slippery through the weather. Shaving off 30kg of dry weight means that ‘Cor, this is good’ has actually become ‘Good god alive, my hair’s on fire.’
The marketing spiel provided suggests that there are 720 horses available to be corralled and I see no reason to doubt this. The application of the right-hand pedal is precise, defined and immediate. No turbo lag is detectable in whatever gear you happen to find yourself or on whatever road and you’ll be overtaking family saloons as if they were hay trucks with nary care nor concern to the seismic and aural disturbance you leave in your wake. The brakes meanwhile will stop you so swiftly your eyes will bulge.
The marketing spiel provided suggests that there are 720 horses available to be corralled
Stylistically the Tributo could divide the crowd a little. It’s not been given the Pinninfarina treatment, instead being birthed by the in-house studio of Centro Stile. It’s not an elegant Ferrari in the classic sense but the swoops, scoops, vortices and vents have to go somewhere; Ferrari could try and hide them but that would compromise performance so they’ve taken the other route – the overt visual aggression on display actually works in its favour. Its muscularity screams performance in a good way.
And yet I still didn’t like this car. It started off unfortunately in the rain and the traffic which probably coloured the whole experience for me. The review vehicle looked magnificent in Blu Corsa highlighted by the shimmering of the late afternoon sunlight refracting through the raindrops but once on the move it was to become five days of high-octane disappointment.
The aforementioned inclement weather is never usually a problem in these days of traction control but the high-performance semi-slick tyres fitted to the Tributo (allied to a squeaky brake disc) meant I spent the 300 miles to my home never daring to take a hand off the wheel while desperately trying to avoid the road paint in an effort to keep the nose pointing reasonably at the Volvo ahead of me on the A1.
My other real niggle during my initial drive home was with the stop-start system. In heavy traffic the engine powered down which was understandable but once I lifted from the brake to inch forward another six feet, the baritone blare of the restart just made me look like a fool to my fellow road users all of whom were stuck in the same jam.
I did eventually find the button to disengage (strangely situated up by the rear-view mirror) but my impression had, by then, been hardened.
The review vehicle looked magnificent in Blu Corsa highlighted by the shimmering of the late afternoon sunlight refracting through the raindrops
Those high-performance tyres were an option (of course they were, this is a Ferrari after all where everything is an option) costing £2,280 so maybe it was the factory’s fault rather than the car’s that my dislike of this vehicle was almost visceral.
This possibility is underscored by other items fitted from the extensive options list such as the 4-point safety harness (£2,112) over and around the carbon fibre racing seats (£6,144) which meant that, when strapped in like a trussed chicken, I looked like an overweight pound-shop Charles LeClerc Tributo act.
The coffee cup holder was oddly situated way forward beneath the overhanging binnacle, so to access my cup for a tasty libation, I would have had to angle and slide it thus spilling my beverage all over the carbon fibre central bridge (£1,632, with optional matt finish for a further £2,400) and the embroidered floor mats (£768). But none of that mattered overly because, strapped into my kinbaku seat, I couldn’t reach the cup anyway.
The F8 Tributo is a car with a clearly defined identity but Ferrari themselves seem somewhat confused by it. It is (in my mind anyway) definitively a track car, albeit without the scaffolding roll cage that might be expected.
It’s got a few softer edges to mollify you while you’re shredding your expensive tyres around Donnington or Brands Hatch but you really wouldn’t want to drive it home – you should get the Roma for that (see our review of that magnificent car here) which is everything the F8 Tributo isn't.
The F8 Tributo is a car with a clearly defined identity but Ferrari themselves seem somewhat confused by it
But Ferrari seem insistent that it’s a more performance-oriented road car than a track monster. Hence the options list also includes Apple CarPlay (£2,400), front parking sensors (£864) and Surround View (£3,456) which really should come as standard on a vehicle that starts at £203,516.
The particular model that I drove tipped the scales at a hefty £325,042 which just goes to show that pairing the word ‘carbon’ with the word ‘fibre’ on a Ferrari options list will likely cause your accountant to have a nosebleed.
I did get the F8 Tributo out on Northumberland’s new tarmac on a dry day and it was great fun. Yes, the car’s wide but with no traffic to worry about and a view from here to the end of the world over the North Pennines picking my line and apex from distance was straightforward and allowed me to revel in the automotive excellence that is Ferrari’s hallmark.
So the lockdown has been dreadful for all sorts of reasons but I thank the road crews in Northumberland for giving me just a hint of what this Ferrari could be.
