2026 Ferrari F80 First Drive Review WOW

Open it up. Stay on the brakes. Stay on the brakes. You can see the difference. Pull down. Hi there. I'm Jonny Lieberman. You're watching Motor Trend. And this is the all new Ferrari F80. But never mind this thing. Because look at this. It's a 288 GTO. It's the daddy. Literally, Ferrari's first supercar. And you might be saying, well what about the 250 GTO? And I'll say, well that car came out before the invention of the word supercar. A few years later. But this was the one. I mean, when I was a kid, Kuntosh probably made me more excited. But if you knew what this was, you were just going nuts. Twin turbo V8. In fact, if you're not familiar with this, you're probably familiar with the Ferrari F40. This is basically the F40 in a different body kit. Yeah, the F40 makes a few more horsepower. But not many. Just, I mean, unbelievable. And if you don't believe me, these people have finally started to realize what they are. And the F40 has doubled or tripled in value over the years. This has gone up 10x in my memory. This is about $4 million. Which is funny because that's actually what the F80 cost. But remember, the 288 GTO, it led to the F40, which led to the F50, which begat the Enzo, which begat the LaFerrari. And now 10 years after that, here we are with the F80. It's a little V6. Twin turbo V6. Makes 888 horsepower. It's actually the same V6 block that you would find in both the 296 and the 499P Le Mans winner. It's won three years in a row. You'll recognize there's a lot of similarities between this and the 499P. In fact, they started working on them back in 2018 simultaneously. In addition to that engine, it's got two motors. One motor for each front wheel. They kick in another, I don't know, 240 horsepower combined. Something like that. Total system output is right around 1,200 horsepower. There's a third motor. It kind of hangs out under the engine instead of being a pancake motor in the transmission. And it does provide a little bit of tractive power, like 20 horsepower when needed. But really, its job is to spin and send electricity either to these motors or to the battery. There's a 2.3 kilowatt hour battery that kind of runs this way behind your butt below the seats. And then there's the aerodynamics. I mean, I don't even really know what I'm talking about. But starting up here with what they call the S-Duct, and you've seen that. It started with the piece that had that. It leads to what they're calling a triplane. So there's three wings. And they start kind of gently ramping up the airflow. So by the time it's exiting the hood here, it's basically going straight up, which then gets sucked back over the windscreen, back over the body, and that goes below the wing. And then you see that Zorro mask up front. That has a little kick-up, which then sends clean air over the wing. So they really control the airflow there. And that's just the top of the car. We're not even talking about this duct here, this channel, which feeds this crazy NACA duct, which cools the radiators, gives air to the engine, cools the rear brakes. Oh, the front brakes, the front brakes. This is the wildest thing. You see these holes, these twin holes here? That actually leads straight into the frame rail of the subframe. It's a hollow piece of the chassis, and that cools the front brakes. I mean, there's that. It's got an asymmetrical chassis. What does that mean? Well, they wanted to keep the silhouette of the Le Mans car, the 499, but they didn't want the car to be wider than a LaFerrari. So instead of having the seats like this, they put them closer together, but then back the passenger seat up. And so they didn't have to make the body any longer. The passenger seat is designed for people in the 85th percentile in terms of height. So if you're over six feet, it's a tight fit, while the driver's seat is more normal. It's designed for people in the 95th percentile. So if you're up to 6'6", you'll be able to drive this car. What else? The wheels are carbon fiber. The brakes are from the Brembo Racing Division. The tires are 3D printed. They 3D printed the tires. I don't even know what that means, but apparently they did. And look at how this door opens. I mean, look at that. The door handle's almost pointing at the sky. But I didn't come all the way out here to the Misano Circuit in Italy to talk about the Ferrari F80. I came here to drive it. All right, the first thing you probably want to know about driving the F80 on the track is that, yes, the air conditioning is fantastic. Second thing you want to know is, yeah, I'd probably put it in manual mode. We are in race. You have the little drive selector thing here, the Ferrari Manettino, I believe it's called. I don't speak Italian. I love Italian. I just don't speak Italian. And then, voila, racetrack. Just to understate everything, this car is so capable it's ridiculous. Warming up the tires, warming up the tires. Okay, so there's this thing called boost optimization. And it's this cool little feature that the F80 has. And what it does is, you turn it on, say I'm going to optimize, and it learns the track. And it's not like it has the Nürburgring stored or something like that. You go and do one lap, and it kind of knows where the apex is. It senses the grip. Is it wet out? Is it cold? Whatever. And then it plans a strategy to deploy the front motors. It's basically battery optimization for the track. And then every time you go to a track, you just go do one lap, optimize for boost, and you're good to go. Now, could you just say, hey, I want max power the whole time? Yes, you can, but it's not a big battery. 2.3 kilowatt hours. And so what that's going to do is, it's going to run out on this track. It's about a 4,000 meter track. That's like 2 point some odd miles. And you're going to get a little more than one lap at full, full power for the whole thing. So boost optimization means the little motor will charge the battery in between corners. And just kind of how F1 works, kind of how the Le Mans hypercar strategy works. And very effective. And again, the other thing is, 888 horsepower from the V6 means for the straights, where you really don't need the front wheels for the extra traction and launching out of a corner, that it's more than adequate. You're fine. You're flying. You know, I think I was seeing like, I don't know, over 260. So it's over 150 on the straight. Yeah, totally fine. Totally works. And again, it's just the strategy is when you actually need full power, it's going to give it to you. That's boost optimization. Now the other thing to know is, and I think what's impressing me so much about this car is like, yeah, it's a 1,200 horsepower hypercar, but actually, I'll get to that in a second. Yeah, it's a 1,200 horsepower hypercar that stops. The brakes are so bloody good. I'd swear, but they beep it. The brakes are unbelievable. They're basically racing brakes, and they're probably not going to show up on other Ferraris because Brembo can't mass produce them because they come from the racing department, not the production car department. And I mean, they are indefatigable, I believe the proper word is, meaning there is, first of all, massive, massive stopping power without any side of fade or the pedal getting long. Actually, the pedal will never get long because it's a brake-by-wire system. And it just works, man. It just like absolutely works. Here's a little case of the brakes. And again, back to the braking, because of the active suspension, making sure that the aero's optimized, you're just flat, and it just works. I can't explain it. The other thing about the braking is because of the active suspension, it just handles any kind of movement you might have under braking, it's just totally solved. It's just a non-event, and it works lap after lap after lap. So then, okay, the biggest and most impressive thing then about driving this car on track is how easy it is. Now look, I know all the internet tough guys are running, you know, cracking their knuckles, they're going to leave a comment, like, oh, I want a real car, I want to challenge me, blah, blah, blah, all this tough guy nonsense. Ludicrous. You know, you want, on a track especially, you want a car that's easy to drive because you don't want to be fighting something. You want to go, you want to go. And it's remarkable. And like when I was out here earlier with an instructor, you know, he'd be like, no, you're supposed to be on that side in second gear, not fourth. Okay, boom, boom, you're in second, you pull over, and it just, it's an easy car to make a correction. And I've driven lots of big dollar, big horsepower stuff on track, and like, sometimes when they're a handful, it's tough and you're nervous and sweating and you don't necessarily want to keep going lap after lap after lap, as I found myself really wanting to in this car. We got three kind of uncorked full sessions and like, while that's awesome, totally not enough. Now, Ferrari, understandably, talking a very big game. And what they're saying is, this is them talking, I've never built a car, but they're saying it's very easy to design a very fast car for a track. It's much harder to do that and then make sure that the same car is going to excel on the road. But like, what just a sweetheart of a track car. Also, you might be noticing, it sounds way better inside the car than outside the car. And Ferrari says that was a choice they made. They just wanted the car to be drivable everywhere. And so, just for like, you know, noise laws globally. What you're really hearing outside the car isn't so much the engine as it is the aero working. And it really does sound like a weather event as the thing goes by. But inside the car, you know, more engine noise, obviously. Yeah, I mean, sounds pretty cool. Kind of like, you know, 296 plus. Over, that's the real story of this car. It's all over too quick. Like, I wanted to talk about how you can take these corners at ridiculous speeds because of the stability provided by the active aero. I guess we'll have to check that out when we get to the road. So, Ferrari made this ridiculous claim that not only was the F80 engineered for the track, but it was equally engineered for the road. I just did about two hours behind the wheel. And I hate to ever agree with a manufacturer about things like that, but it might actually be more engineered for the road than it is for the track. The dynamic range of this vehicle is incredible. You can be sitting on the Autostrata at 85 miles an hour with traffic and the engine's barely ticking over at 1,000 RPM. And then you twist the little thing, the Manettino, to race. It explodes. You downshift, put it in manual, and it just becomes an animal. I mean, it's like the Ferrari 296 is one of the most amazing vehicles I've ever driven as a street car. And this is like, you take that and just pump every single thing up. It's got more power. It turns better. The brakes are better. I'm a little at a loss for words. I just don't want to ever disagree with what the presentation at the briefing says. But in this case, they're right. I mean, the F80, it's absolutely incredible. Is anything worth $4 million? I don't know. But if I had $4 million I didn't need for anything else and they said, go get a car, I mean, if it's not this, what else? Well, maybe that 288 GTOX. I don't know.