Ferrari F80 Hypercar driven

News.com.au

10-07-2025

Fanging a car with 20 per cent more power than a Formula One racer and a $7 million price tag on a racetrack might sound like billionaire behaviour, or a typical Tuesday for Lewis Hamilton, but for a mere mortal, the prospect of piloting Ferrari's new F80 can produce cavalcades of cold sweat.
The F80 – which can smash through the 100km/h mark in just 2.1 seconds and blast past 200km/h in 5.75, on its way to a top speed of 350km/h – uses a vastly vavoomed version of the 3.0-litre turbo V6 hybrid engine found in the sensational Ferrari 296 GTB, and in the brand's 499P World Endurance race car (it's won the last three 24 Hours of Le Mans events in a row).
In Ferrari's 296, that highly strung V6 makes a whopping 614kW, in the race car it is limited to 500kW, but the F80 raises the bar to the moon, with 883kW – or 1200 horsepower (an F1 driver must make do with just 1000 horses, a mere trifle).
Being strapped into the racing harness of this weapon on wheels it's impossible to miss that my driving coach is not only squeezed in and pushed towards the passenger door, but he's sitting slightly behind me as well. This is the F80's radical 'one-plus-one' seating layout, which puts the (heavily sweating) driver closer to the middle of the action.
Said coach is busily explaining to me that the car has already learned its way around the Misano circuit in Italy we'll be driving and that by engaging the F80's unique 'Boost Optimisation' system, it will give me an extra punch of F1-style electric power where the computers have calculated I need it most (on corner exits, basically).
Pondering, as I am, just how absurd the levels of grunt now tempting my right foot are, it occurs to me that I need more boost like I need to suddenly and violently age by 20 years.
Every logical bone in my brain is telling me that this F80 is going to be too much, that 1200 horsepower is the kind of thing only racing drivers are mad enough to entertain. Three laps later all other cars have been ruined for me and I'm trying to work out how many of my children, and organs, I'll need to sell to raise the $7 million.
The F80's acceleration is beyond belief, rough shoving you into the seat as if God himself has placed a palm on your chest and said 'not so fast, Son', while the braking, from its new carbon ceramic units, provided more g-force facial squishing than I've ever experienced outside of passenger rides in actual race cars (they can stop the F80 from 100km/h in just 28m, or from 200km/h in 98m, very handy on a racetrack).
What sticks in your spinning mind most, however, is just how fast you can hurl it through corners, thanks to the incredible active aerodynamic package fitted to this car (including a DRS-style rear wing much like the one on Hamilton's work Ferrari), which mashes you into the ground with more than a tonne of downforce at 250km/h, which just happens to be the speed you can take the fastest flying corner at Misano (or you can if you have testicles the size of water melons, I managed 200km/h).
Another clever bits of tech that make getting all this power to the ground plausible include the fact that this Ferrari is all-wheel drive, with an electrified motor in each front wheel. Apparently the Ferrari engineers have concluded that once you go past 1000 horsepower, rear-wheel drive alone is not enough.
And not wise.
The next day we were encouraged to try the F80 on real roads in a real world that seems unsuited to so much madness, but I was surprised again to learn that it doesn't ride as brutally as one might expect from a machine that seems to be basically an F1 car with a roof.
The passenger seat is truly awful, but if you're the one paying the $7 million, you'll never be sitting there anyway.
THIRST: 13.5L/100km
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