Maybe it’s just that Porsche (and the rest of Germany) seems so intent on going “full retard” by either undermining their tight-knit Mittelstand industrial base with EVisation (and thus Chinese-centric supply chains), or just blandly reiterating the umpteenth iteration of the same too-bulky rear-engined slot car, but the self-haters in Stuttgart are currently losing their appeal faster than you can say “ze profits ahr down”. Suffice to say that one man’s failure is another man’s fortune, particularly in the nearly-zero-sum attention game that is the world of status markers, so we can deduce that someone, somewhere must be benefitting handsomely. Obviously the Yangtze River Delta alliance is near the top of the list of beneficiaries when it comes to the “emissions-free” transport category that Porsche so ham-fistedly waded into recently, but when it comes to the more time-honoured gas-guzzling luxury motoring that the firm has long scratched at the lower echelons of, the north star continues to be Maranello’s very own: Ferrari.
While the latest Luce toastergate fiasco has largely blown over now – with Sirs Ive and Newsom suitably hung out to dry as pagan pariahs burned at the altar of Bruxellian overreach – the rest of the the road car divisioni seems to be firing on more cylinders than the average Italian government, although that’s admittedly setting the bar somewhere beneath the ruins of Pompeii. Never mind the hedge-fund-backed auction results that are putting F40, F50, LaF, and SP3 on pedestals previously reserved for 250 GTO, just looking at the raw volumetric outputs of fresh models in the past year-and-a-half shows no less than 16(!) entries, so basically something “new” is hitting the web every 4.5 weeks or so. That’s a level of design generativity you’d expect from Hyundai/Kia because the Koreans have a chip on their shoulder the size of a peninsula, but from a boutique Italian supercar brand that’s arguably been on top of the brand world for as long as any of us has been alive? That’s Montezuma levels of insanity.
Much of the credit – in your author’s humble opinion at least – is owed to one of its most under-appreciated leaders, head design boss at Centro Stile: Flavio Manzoni. Since 2010, starting with the alien-mirrored LaFerrari and with scarcely a misstep since, Manzoni has brought his architectural finesse to the firm and left a sophisticated imprimatur that will probably take decades to fully appreciate. But why wait? Today, we celebrate! Without further ado:
- We won’t dwell on Ferrari’s F1 performance with Hamilton at the wheel, Jack B. rings that bell louder (and better) than yours truly ever could, but we’ll note that while the 499P WEC car might grab fewer mainstream eyeballs with arriviste Drive To Survivers, it’s arguably second only to the F1 Schumacher era in top Prancing Horse motorsports achievements in the past 50 years. ↩