Ferrari's 488 GTB has gone turbo. But what's it like to drive?

A small company from northern Italy recently chose to turbocharge one of its sports cars, a decision of potential interest to the few thousand people annually with £180,000 to spend on an impractical, fast two-seat coupe.

There were several good reasons why this small company from northern Italy made this decision. The newly turbocharged sports car makes far more power and torque than its naturally aspirated predecessor, helping it to go considerably quicker both in a straight line and around a track. It will do this while burning a bit less fuel and emitting a bit less carbon dioxide.

You would think, therefore, that the decision of this small company from northern Italy to turbocharge one of its sports cars would be viewed as a) blindingly obvious, uncontroversial, and b) pretty inconsequential in the grand scheme. Ford fitting a new indicator stalk to the Fiesta would have a greater cumulative impact on the driving world.

Pictures: John Wycherley

Problem is, the small company from northern Italy is Ferrari, and the sports car is the 488 GTB, successor to the 458 Italia and Speciale. Which means the decision to turbocharge has had the sort of response you’d expect were, say, the Pope to rock up to midnight mass sporting a peroxide mohawk.

There are good reasons for this. Firstly, because to experience – ideally from the driver’s seat, but frankly anywhere within a four-mile radius – a 458 Speciale at full chat, banging off its 9,000rpm limit, was one of the modern motoring phenomena, an affirmation of the rightness of high-revving, naturally aspirated sports cars. But also because where Ferrari leads, the rest tend to follow. If even Maranello – with its all-but-infinite engineering budget – can’t stem the tide of turbocharging, what hope is there for the cars the rest of us drive? For while turbos may offer an easy slug of extra power for less fuel, we all know of their fuzzying effect on engine response, how they mute noise and dull throttle. Why have you betrayed us, Ferrari?

Ferrari, fear not, is aware of this sensitivity. Before being permitted to do anything so uncouth as drive the 488, we were subjected to a monster press briefing, in which the Maranello boffins spent many hours and several million PowerPoint slides explaining how they’d engineered a turbo engine with the reactions and feel of a nat-asp V8. Which begs the question: if you can make a turbo engine feel like a non-turbo engine, why make it turbo at all?

Partly it’s about reducing emissions – though Ferrari isn’t bound by the same CO2 targets as mass-market carmakers, it has to be seen to be heading in the right direction. The 488 officially returns 260g/km, which is Prius-like by supercar standards. Much more, though, it’s about keeping up in the power wars. With McLaren eyeing 700bhp from its turbo V8, Maranello engineers admit the only way to squeeze more power from the 458’s engine would have been to go bigger (adding weight) or hybrid (adding weight).

So turbos it is, but the 488’s powerplant is very much not that of the 458 with a couple of blowers welded on. It’s a flat-crank, 3.9-litre engine from the same F154 family as the California – but with bespoke turbos, crank, con rods, exhaust… bespoke pretty much everything, in fact. 

The results are faintly menacing. The 488 GTB makes 661bhp and, perhaps even more significantly, 560lb ft of torque, all available from under 3,000rpm. It’ll officially do 0–62mph in 3.0secs, and hit 124mph barely five seconds later. Surface-to-air missiles have boasted a shabbier set of vital statistics.

But supercars, of course, are about more than mere numbers. As Ferrari’s chief engineer of Bleepy Warning Noises finally wrapped up the 488 presentation, we escaped into the Maranello hills to see how the new mohawk suited His Holiness.

Sweet mother of Stig, the 488 is quick. The first time I find an empty bit of road and depress the throttle, it’s apparent within, ooh, a couple of milliseconds that the 488’s acceleration is a league beyond that of the 458, even beyond the Lambo Huracán, flinging you down the road with the shocking, brutal thrust of a fighter jet on take-off. It’s the sort of acceleration that pins you deep in your seat, that causes a string of involuntary expletives to spew forth from your lips.


Approaching a tight right-hander, I glance down at the dash to check what gear I’m in. A couple of microseconds later, I return my eyes to the road and discover with interest that I am a) going 40mph quicker than expected, b) 100 metres closer to the apex than expected and c) have liberated an entire, long-forgotten subfolder of frenzied swearing from deep within my subconscious. This much is clear: if someone has an off in a 488, it’s not going to be small. 

The software of the 458’s seven-speed dual-clutch ’box has been revised for faster shifts, adding to a surge of torque that is relentless, the power arriving in a continuous deluge with barely a blink between gears. So remorseless is the thrust that I kept battering into the 488’s limiter, expecting the rush never to run out. The throttle response is all but instantaneous, the power linear, even and massive.

Fast, then, but does the 488’s engine feel like a Ferrari V8? It doesn’t feel like an old Ferrari V8, that’s for sure. The turbo engine certainly doesn’t gain and lose revs with the massless snap of the old naturally aspirated V8, which would drop from 8,000rpm to idle so quickly you wondered how the rev-counter needle could keep up.

Despite Ferrari claiming the 488 boasts the fastest reactions of any turbo engine, there’s no doubting the new V8 is just a mite less frenetic in its response than the 458.
 Not slow, mind, and addictive in its own way. It’s a different sort of power, this: broad-shouldered and all-consuming, an unstoppable wrecking ball of pure speed.


And what of the noise? Again, the 488 doesn’t sound like an old Ferrari. Whereas, in that 458 Speciale, you felt you were stretching some sort of mad elastic band as the revs increased, the noise getting higher, tighter, more frenzied, the 488’s soundtrack is more linear, controlled, compressed.
It doesn’t have the baritone-to-soprano range of the old nat-asp V8, trading the 458’s vocal diversity for a heftier, chest-filling boom.

Certainly it doesn’t get all screaming and sparkly at the top end, just louder, angrier.
 It sounds not unlike a modern F1 car with its pit-lane limiter on, a bass-heavy, air-bullying thump overlaid with a medley of whooshes, cracks and mechanical edge. Interesting, for sure, but it doesn’t have the fizz of that atmospheric V8.


But – as my nan always used to say – what you lose in the noise department, you gain in slip angle. The 458, especially the Speciale, was pretty tidy at the sideways stuff, but the 488 takes it to a whole new level. I’m not the sort of driver to jump in a 600bhp-plus, rear-drive supercar and start immediately drifting it on public roads (I know, what a square), but – with the on-wheel manettino dialled back to CT OFF – after just a few corners I was quickly achieving neat, controllable slides, hanging the 488’s tail out before flicking back into line like a shabby, Cornish Ken Block.

I’d love to claim such immaculate oversteer was thanks to my innate talent. But, if I’m being honest, it was very much thanks to the utter genius of the second-gen Side Slip Control (SSC2) installed on the 488, which now adjusts not only the rear diff and electronics, but even the damping front and rear for even greater slip angles.



If you fear the increasing complexity of sports cars distracts from the driving experience, try this one before you consign all tech to the dustbin. SSC2 is no now-stop-that-right-now safety net, shutting down the power as soon as it spots a hint of slip. Quite the opposite: it all but encourages you to engage in gorgeous, steady slides, allowing you to get sideways and somehow, imperceptibly, holding you there. 

In the aforementioned tech briefing, a Ferrari engineer showed us the equation used to calibrate SSC2. It covered an entire page of A4, and looked like something out of The Theory of Everything. Point is, there’s some very clever stuff going on, but as a driver you have no sensation of the electronics doing their thing, simply that you’ve been transformed, overnight, into a Driving God.

Sure, Ferrari could doubtless have mated this genius new system to a nat-asp V8, but the 488’s ludicrous benevolence is thanks at least in part to SSC2 working hand in hand with the vast, level plateau of torque served up from the V8. 
It’s not all bad news, this turbo lark. 

So here it is, the £180,000 question: is the 488 GTB a better car than the 458 Italia? The easy answer is this: yes, it is. The 488 GTB costs the same as the 458, but offers a lot more power and speed for less fuel. Simple. 

Unfortunately things are rarely simple when you’re dealing with a topic as emotive as a shouty red lump of Italian exotica. So the more considered answer is: hmm. Now then. It boils down, I think, to what you want from your V8 supercar. 

There’s no denying the 488 doesn’t have quite the tingling effervescence of the 458, doesn’t goad you to the red line in quite the same way, doesn’t sing so lustily when you get there.
 But it feels new, and different, and stonkingly fast. It sounds unique, and offers up a dizzying, crushing surge of torque. It’ll turn you into an oversteering hero on road and track, and use a surprisingly modest amount of fuel while doing so.

What’s more important to the sort of person prepared to blow the best part of £200k on a fast car? No idea. Lend me £200k and I’ll tell you.

So is the 488 a better car than the 458? Here’s the honest answer. It doesn’t matter. It’s here, and the 458’s gone. Whether you embrace the turbocharged, or pine lustily for the departing days of atmospheric sports cars, the shift is happening. Get used to it. The naturally aspirated era is at its end, but the 488 at least proves the new dawn won’t be one of characterless vacuum cleaners. Welcome, one and all, to the Age of Turbo.