Ferrari's four-wheel drive GT car has been updated. We drive the GTC4 Lusso, replacement for the FF, and find out if it is worthy of its famous name
What is it?
Stick a square body on the back of a coupe and, inevitably, it’ll get called a breadvan. Curious. The Ferrari GTC4 Lusso – facelift of the five-year old FF – is Ferrari’s take on the theme.
Ferrari likes having a front-engined, four-seater in its range. By default it has been a V12, and so it is here. Until the FF arrived, replacing the 612 Scaglietti, what it never had was four-wheel drive.
The FF did, and the GTC4 Lusso still does now, but the Lusso also has four-wheel steering, thanks to a development of the system that appeared on the F12tdf last year – an actuator on the toe-link on the rear suspension can give a little positive or negative lock, to increase either agility or stability.
That’s the most notable mechanical thing in a raft of changes that Ferrari thinks warrant an entire name change: FF out, GTC4 Lusso in.
Here are those changes in no particular order, then. There’s a restyling of the outside – the rear in particular, where twin (attractive) tail lamps each side replace single (less attractive) ones. There are some aero and rear roof profile changes too, but while some coupe-estates are beautiful and some are plain quirky, to me this still errs towards the latter. Nothing particularly wrong with that, mind. Breadvans are a rare groove, maybe, but the thing I find about a rare groove, is that a lot of people like them. The design at the front has the Lusso appearing lower, wider and more aggressive than the FF, because engine changes demand more cooling, and the grille opening has been widened as a result.
And what demands more cooling? Why, a more powerful engine, of course. Because 651bhp is never enough but 680bhp is just about right. The GTC4’s 6.3-litre naturally aspirated V12 makes its peak power at 8000rpm and runs into the limiter at 8250rpm – Ferrari’s estate car is not exactly a Skoda Superb 2.0 TDI – and it drives all four wheels through two gearboxes.
Which is where things get a little complicated: at the rear there’s a seven-speed dual-clutch automatic transaxle gearbox – whose position helps give a slight rearward weight bias. In front of the engine, however, which is mounted so far back in the chassis that there’s room for this feature, is a ‘power transfer unit’, which is a two-speed gearbox, driven directly from the crankshaft, which has two wet clutches, one for each front wheel. The PTU can handle up to 20% of torque, but often gets none, and the clutches always slip so that the front wheels turn at the right speeds relative to the rears. Its lower gear works during 1st and 2nd on the rear gearbox, and its higher gear in 3rd and 4th. Beyond that the wheels are turning so fast that the PTU would be a drag rather than a help to them, so the GTC4 reverts to rear-drive only. Which, given the top end of fourth gear arrives at around 120mph, is a speed at which you probably shouldn’t need 4wd anyway.
There are big changes inside. The steering wheel is new, and Ferrari has vastly improved the ergonomics of the buttons on it (though still refuses to acknowledge the ergonomic advantages of the rim being round). And then there’s the new infotainment system. There’s a screen. A wide one. Neatly, it’s covered at the corners by the swoopy bits atop the dashboard, so it looks nicely integrated and rather classy. It doesn’t work too shabbily, either – though you’d want to play with it for a few hours straight before saying whether it’s up to the standards of BMW’s iDrive and the like. On the passenger side it’s augmented by a wide, short touch-screen panel so the passenger can fiddle around with some settings, too. Nice touch.
The GTC4 genuinely seats four, as well: at 5’10” I could comfortably sit behind my own driving position with an inch or so of knee and headroom. Plus there’s a 450-litre boot, which is wide, though far from flat, but the upper halves of the rear seats split/fold to increase the volume to 800-litres, and you care so little about that you’ve stopped reading already haven’t you so fine, onwards.
What's it like?
Inside? Very nice too, dear. Plush. And when you fire up the GTC4, although it makes a rich noise, it doesn’t make a deafening one. This is, for a car of this type, a good thing. It has a supercar engine, but instantly the modest noise that it makes suggests it knows its place.
Other signs are strong, too. The seats are comfortable, the driving position good, visibility decent – you can’t see the end of the bonnet and the rear window is small, but the GTC4 feels quite usable. You still have to think twice about kerbs and grounding it over harsh speed bumps and such, but, hey – it is, after all, a Ferrari.
In case you forget it’s a Ferrari (unlikely, given the number of prancing horses the company adorns the car with), the engine will remind you. Oh, sure, it mooches around amenably enough at low speeds, at which point the gearbox shuffles ratios cleanly and smoothly and the ride is fairly composed. But this is an engine that ‘only’ makes 514lb ft of torque and makes it at 5750rpm (yes, that’s a lot, but not in the context of 680bhp at 8000rpm). If you want to make progress, in other words, you will have to exercise your right boot.
Do so and the noise hardens, response quickens, and the whole 1920kg caboodle finally takes off. Throttle response at any revs is good, but the strength of acceleration just grows and grows as you wind around the rev-counter. Upshifts feel instant, downshifts nicely brapped if you’ve got revs wound on and you’re braking hard – the limits of the standard carbon ceramics are unapproachable on the road – but muted if you’re driving more slowly.
That’s something the GTC4 remains good at, too, by the way. Adaptive dampers mean the ride/handling balance is always a good one. I can’t think of a road situation when you’d really want the dampers in their sport setting, but even if you put the drivetrain into sport, you can push the dampers back into a softer ‘bumpy road’ setting.
The steering’s pretty good. Ferraris steer quickly, as a rule, which can make some feel too lively, but the GTC4’s measures around 2.2 turns lock-to-lock, and it’s stable at speed – yet responsive to turn-in. Doubtless the rear-steer helps in both of those situations, but you don’t really notice it working, unlike in the massively aggressive F12tdf on which the system made its debut. Here it’s honed, and more suited to giving a bit more agility on turn in, yet a bit more stability on the highway.
And that’s how these systems should work: unidentifiably. I wonder if you sometimes can feel the 4wd system shuffling things, and the steering tugging a bit in response, but I’d want a more thorough handling test than our drive allowed to be sure of its extreme handling.
Should I buy one?
Could I honestly sit here and say to you that what you really need is a four-seat pseudo estate car that doesn’t have back doors, has a smallish boot by the standards of things, and has a supercar engine that will return you 350g/km of carbon dioxide? No, of course not.
Especially bearing in mind that it costs nearly a quarter of a million quid before you’ve even put an option on it – and you will, which would take the price towards twice as much as a Bentley Continental GT or an Aston Martin DB11 (whose first impressions are extremely promising). It is not twice as good as the former and I doubt it’ll be twice as good as the latter.
And most likely, none of that matters. This is the only place you can get four seats, a decent boot, a naturally-aspirated V12 engine that revs over 8000rpm, and that is all wrapped in a quirkily appealing body. There’s a reason it’s the only place you can do that: but like we say, rare grooves are curiously appealing.
Ferrari GTC4 Lusso
Price: £240,430 Engine V12, 6262cc, petrol; Power 680bhp at 8000rpm; Torque 514lb ft at 5750rpm; Gearbox Seven-speed dual-clutch auto; Kerb weight 1920kg; Top speed 208mph; 0-62mph3.4sec; Economy 18.8mpg; CO2/tax band 350g/km / 37%
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