theceomagazine.com | 159and you can find yourself sailing out the
other side of a bend before you’ve even fully
realised you’ve entered one, your mind
genuinely struggling to process all that
power. The steering is fabulous at any
speed: pinpoint accurate and delivering its
feedback constantly, helping you feel a part
of the car rather than a passenger.
Yet, in the city, this fastest of V8 Ferraris
is also surprisingly friendly. Some out-and-
out performance cars feel like they’re forever
straining on their leash at slow speeds, and
driving one in traffic has you longing for the
sweet relief of death. But not so the Pista.
The ride, even combined with its wafer-thin
seats, won’t have you speed-dialling the
chiropractor, and the addition of Ferrari’s
‘bumpy road’ suspension setting makes
navigating speed bumps or choppy roads a
relatively painless experience.
More importantly, though, the Pista has
been designed with nothing but fun in mind.
And so it debuts some very clever
technology that exists only to put a smile on
its owner’s face.
Ferrari’s Side Slip Control function (which
uses an array of sensors to gently stiffen the
front suspension as you enter a corner,
making it that little bit easier to launch a
heroic drift), partners with a new progressive
braking function that senses whether or not
you’re trying to step the tail out, and then
applies just the right amount of stopping
power to maintain the slide, rather than pull
you up completely.
Ferrari refers to the two systems as its
Dynamic Enhancer, and they make a driving
hero out of even the most ham-fisted pilot.
The Pista is an incredible 90 kilograms
lighter than the 488 GTB on which it’s
based, with Ferrari exploring every possible
way to shave grams (there’s no glovebox, for
example, and carbon fibre everywhere). But
it’s the wind-tunnel aerodynamic work that is
easily the most impressive. Consider that
the Pista is a measly three per cent more
powerful than the 458 Speciale, but serves
up 22 per cent more downforce and has a
16 per cent better power-to-weight ratio.
The most obvious new aero addition is
what Ferrari calls its S-Duct: a wide-
mouthed opening in that sharp, plunging
bonnet that sucks air up and over the
windscreen (in the shape of an S), driving
the front tyres into the tarmac to help
produce extra grip.
It’s no coincidence that the Pista is
Ferrari’s most virtually engineered model to
date; all sorts of crazy combinations are
plugged into Ferrari’s impressive VR rig,
allowing the brand’s test drivers to cycle
through an endless number of aerodynamic,
suspension and steering setups before
settling on something that could be built into
a working prototype.
But if the US$340,000-plus Pista proves
nothing else, it’s that in a brave new world of
electrified motoring, there is still room for
pulse-racing and petrol-pumping
performance cars. Very loud ones. And few
cars on the road today will get your heart
thumping quite so hard as this ferociously
fast Ferrari.Hasta la Pista, baby | INDULGE