For reasons unknown, Ferrari, the venerable and vaunted Italian maker of automotive dreams, won’t be in residence at the Javits Center this week. It’s especially surprising since only a month ago, the crowd was thronged around the Ferrari stand at the Geneva Auto Show for the worldwide debut of its new, limited-edition, top-of-the-line hypercar. Having clawed my way to see that car from twenty paces, I can safely predict that an official North American launch will be no less intense.
The very idea of a successor to the highly collectible, technically advanced and ultra-high-performance F40, F50 and Enzo is enough to get the people going. And the car looks plenty striking — blending the classical lines of Ferrari’s fondly remembered 1960s P4/P5 racing cars with the official look of modern auto design: angry insect cum Transformer.
But the new Ferrari has more to recommend it. Its 950 hp will explain the throngs that gather around, along with the car’s top speed of 218 mph. For math fans, there’s its racecar-quick zero-to-60 time of less than 3 seconds.
The fact that our subject is a gasoline-electric hybrid — with an electric motor to assist an already brutal V12 of the internal combustion persuasion — is the crowning point of distinction, if not environmental consequence. Like the rest in its luxury cohort, its work in the arena can be viewed as technically interesting, but clearly not yet saving-the-planet kind of stuff.
Only 499 of this new Ferrari will be built, so it’s exclusive and guaranteed to stay so with a price tag north of $1 million. Ferrari has hinted that its small run has already sold out.
As for naming rights, following the F40s and F50s, which proceeded in a fairly logical nomenclatural progression, the Enzo was named to honor the memory of Ferrari’s tough-as-nails founder.
One seemingly logical step would have been to call this the Ferrari Luca after Enzo’s fiery successor, the soon-to-be-departing and famously autocratic boss man, Luca di Montezemolo. Instead, the new machina was named LaFerrari, which, in its total self-referentiality, also manages to skirt the boundaries of good taste by a wide margin.
Now, in case anyone missed you pulling up in your noisy red phallus or neglected your logo-enriched sunglasses, you get another opportunity to impress.
“Did I mention that my Ferrari is the Ferrari LaFerrari?”