Ferrari California in Motor Sport Magazine
In this month’s Motor Sport magazine, there is an excellent review of the Ferrari California by Andrew Frankel who makes several positive comments about the car’s styling and potential appeal in the market place:
…from where I’m sitting the California still looks like a beautifully judged piece of work. The era when Pininfarina seemed unable to produce a less than utterly gorgeous Ferrari now seems like a very long time ago, but at last the styling house appears to have dramatically rediscovered its form.
More beautiful still is its concept. Purists will sniff at its folding metal roof and automated transmission and conclude that Ferrari has gone soft, when in fact it’s just returning to one of its historically happier hunting grounds. Indeed I think there’s every chance this new California will prove a better car in its time than the original did half a century or so ago.
The new California, with its 454bhp V8 motor and a likely 3.8sec sprint to 60mph, will rarely if ever be outpaced by anything it’s likely to come across on the public road. Also, and for the moment at least, I have total confidence in Ferrari’s refusal to sit back and let the brand do its talking.
At certain times in its past, notably in the early 1990s, it has become lazy and produced underwhelming, overpriced cars that simply sold because they were Ferraris, but I see no sign of such complacency at present.
True, I don’t care much for the ugly and outsize 612 Scaglietti but there’s no doubting the integrity of its engineering, while the Scuderia and 599GTB are among Maranello’s greatest road cars of all time.
Via: www.ferrari.co.uk