6:30 am, September 25, 2022
Luckily for Nationwide, I still get enough of a kick out of this job to pay my mortgage.
And one of the things that never fails to get me tapping away at my keyboard or producing a ropey video for my YouTube channel is the launch of a new car.
While I might not have been at the official glitzy launch, sipping champagne and asking engineers intelligent questions, I still enjoy flicking through the press photos, reading what rubbish the chief designer was inspired by and loading up the configurator. I know that sounds just a little pompous but I like cars – plain and simple.
Which is why I can understand the whole discussion around the new Ferrari. The internet is awash with people’s takes on the car, and most of them are of the negative kind.
By this point in this magazine, you might have read our spread detailing all the things you need to know about the Purosangue – it’s on pages 10 and 11 if you haven’t – and you’ll probably have your own opinions. I have to say I feel strangely ambivalent about it.
That’s odd really because it’s a Ferrari. Yes, the company does go through strange cycles of producing absolutely stunning-looking cars then ones with little artistic merit at all, but I’m always pleased the company exists. Whether the fact that I read a cracking biography of Enzo Ferrari over the summer has anything to do with this notion I don’t know, but the car world has been a better place with the Prancing Horse in it over the years.
And the Purosangue’s development has been pure Italian high opera. Journalists have lobbed questions to Ferrari management for years about whether they would follow the trend of building performance SUVs, and the answer was always a firm no.
Even as recently as 2017, then-CEO Sergio Marchionne was very adamant that he wouldn’t ‘bastardise’ the brand by building a type of car that could never have the ‘driving dynamics’ of a Ferrari. No Ferrari SUV, then.
But to a different group of reporters a few months later, Marchionne completely went back on his earlier pronouncement and said an SUV ‘would probably happen’. This is high Italian art, right here.
Fast-forward to this month and after five years the SUV is here. But to ratchet up the melodrama, Ferrari doesn’t call its SUV an SUV. Paragraph after paragraph in the official press release goes on about the Purosangue being the brand’s first four-door, four-seater in its 75-year history – it ain’t an SUV, comprendere?
Proof of that, says Ferrari, is how the engine is jammed up against the bulkhead, the gearbox is at the back for better weight distribution, and the engine itself being Ferrari’s most iconic – a naturally aspirated V12.
I’m not actually appalled as others are that the Purosangue exists. I was always a big fan of the GTC4 Lusso, and some owners were well known for taking their cars to the Alps or on the type of terrain where a conventional Ferrari would suffer.
The Purosangue is the same concept, albeit on stilts and with an extra pair of doors. It’ll surely bring in sales by the bucket-load. Despite costing upwards of £300,000-plus, the Purosangue has both SUV desirability and practical appeal, and I think Ferrari will struggle to cap sales to 20 per cent of its overall manufacturing output (it’s apparently well on course to sell more than 12,000 cars this year).
Unlike others, I don’t have a problem with a car company spotting an opportunity it can milk and make money from – they’re businesses after all.
What I like less so is the whole theatre about creating the SUV in the first place. Just call it an SUV and embrace the reason for building it, as Porsche, Bentley, Aston Martin and Lamborghini have. And while I’m at it, I want Ferrari to have as much self-obsessed pomposity when it comes to the hard sell of electric supercars in the near future.
I’m off now to spec my Purosangue on the configurator.
This feature appears in the current edition of Car Dealer – issue 175 – along with news, views, reviews and much, much more! Click here to read and download it for free!
