First drive: the Ferrari California T Handling Speciale

What’s this then?

Ferrari’s softest car made a little bit firmer. You can now add an optional ‘Handling Speciale’ pack to your California T, yours for £5,568 on top of the £155,230 asking price.

It does include the magnetic dampers that 70 per cent of Cali T buyers go for anyway, however, which are £3,168 alone. Ferrari is keen to stress this is not meant to be a track-dwelling California, but a gentle tightening of the standard car’s handling. It is louder, faster around corners but no more powerful - still very much the everyday GT of the range.  

What’s new?

The only hardware changes are a redesigned silencer for the exhaust, turning up the volume by 3dB right across the rev range_, plus new springs, which are 16 per cent firmer at the front, 19 per cent at the rear.

New software for the seven-speed twin-clutch gearbox, adapted from the 488 GTB and F12tdf, cuts the speed of upshifts by 30 per cent and downshifts by 40 per cent, while new settings for the adaptive dampers and traction control are designed to widen the gap between the Comfort and Sport settings on the three-stage Manettino dial. The third setting is everything off.

Does it make a difference?

Yep. Ferrari boiled it down into lots and lots of numbers for us. But it also explained it thus: if you consider the change in sound, handling, agility, body roll, ride comfort, steering, traction and gearshift speed when you switch the standard California T from Comfort to Sport, then the Handling Speciale pack in its Sport mode is the same leap again. The HS pack in its Comfort mode sits somewhere between the standard car’s Comfort and Sport. 

What about in the real world?

Even in Sport mode, on some fairly aged Italian tarmac, the HS never feels too firm. On some UK roads you may want to keep everything in Sport and switch the dampers back to their softer setting (doable via the ‘Bumpy Road’ button on the wheel), but the point is this: the California T HS is a Ferrari you could happily use everyday, come rain or shine. In terms of comfort this is in a different world to the 488 or F12.

With the HS pack fitted, there are tangible improvements to the way it goes around corners. It doesn’t move in a massless way, like the 488; you feel the weight, particularly at the rear when the roof is down. There’s still body roll to factor in to your entry speed, just less than before, but that still feels at odds with the light but whipcrack-quick steering.

Bully it a bit and there’s understeer to start with, but then all four tyres bite and stick limpet-like to your chosen line. The chassis is so well sorted than you really can throw the car around, get it moving underneath you and it never feels like it’s going to spit you into the scenery. After 45 minutes of hurling it along an Italian mountain road, though, I must admit to feeling a little queasy. It’s at its best, this car, when you’re scything along at seven-tenths, enjoying the scenery and feeling the sun on your forehead.

Proof of its friendly nature is that we spent the majority of our time in the ESC-off mode, not something that’s always advisable on tight Italian roads, with kamikaze cyclists and donkeys around every corner. Even in the newly calibrated and slightly looser Sport mode, the traction control is just too active, constantly cutting in and spoiling the fun.

With everything off you get the hit of the whole engine but that doesn’t mean eye-widening spikes of oversteer on the exit of every corner. That’s thanks to the beautifully progressive Pirelli P Zeros and the relatively gentle way the torque is introduced: it’s limited to around 410lb ft (instead of 557lb ft) in the first three gears, at low rpm, to give you an incentive to rev it. 

And the noise?  

It’s my biggest issue to be honest. The HS pack brings a slightly more flamboyant flare of revs when you twist the key and then push the Start button (surely just one or the other is enough?). When you open the taps through a tunnel with the roof off the decibels that reverberate back at you are a frightening force, but the rest of the time it just sounds, well, plain. On a number of occasions I found my index finger wandering the centre console, searching for a non-existent exhaust button to really uncork this engine’s sonic potential.

It’s largely just a drone that increases in pitch and intensity, with a few woofles and splutters at low revs. There are no ear-piercing crackles, no layers to the melody. I know this is supposed to be the GT model, but there’s still a Ferrari badge on the bonnet, and an average-soundtrack is a big disappointment.

There are glimmers of light, though. Full-throttle upshifts are accompanied by a rifle shot explosion, punctuated with a gentle nudge in the back. It’s a thing of endless wonder, Ferrari’s seven-speed twin-clutch gearbox, and not just for the speed of shifts, but the way the software is manipulated to deliver a gentle jolt in this application, and a bloody great boot in the back in more extreme models further up the range. 

What about POWER - any more here?

No, but then 552bhp from a 3.9-litre twin-turbo V8, a 0-62mph time of 3.6 seconds and a 196mph top speed hardly equates to inadequate, does it? One of the Ferrari engineers put it beautifully: “Increasing the power is easy, being able to use it is the hard part.” Avid drag racers out there could always do with more poke, but for the rest of us, who use our car on the road, for normal things, the California T’s urgency is just about perfect.

The small, twin-scroll turbos all but eliminate lag, leaving you with an engine that delivers huge lunges of acceleration whenever you require it. Yes, the torque is limited early-on in the first three gears to give the engine a more natural, zingy feel, but that doesn’t mean there’s a lack of it. Put the gearbox into auto mode and the speed with which the computer shuffles you into the higher ratios, even at low speeds, is proof that the torque is there, in any gear, whenever you need it.   

A mixed bag then?

It all depends on how you look at it. If you had your eye on the California T anyway, we’d definitely recommend the HS pack. The bigger gap between Comfort and Sport setting gives you a wider window in which to play, but the Cali’s fundamentally friendly and useable character remains wholly intact. Ferrari probably could have taken things a little further, tightened up the body control a touch more and worked on the soundtrack a lot more, but then you start to encroach on the models above it and erode the California’s USP.

In isolation, then, the California T is a hugely accomplished and not-unattractive convertible, and the Handling Speciale pack only bolsters that. But then perhaps California T remains the Ferrari for people who don’t really want a Ferrari at all, they want the badge.