{"id":181583,"date":"2021-08-02T12:48:10","date_gmt":"2021-08-02T09:48:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mancodestyle.com\/uncategorized\/ferrariromackarkson\/"},"modified":"2022-03-21T13:33:56","modified_gmt":"2022-03-21T11:33:56","slug":"ferrariromackarkson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mancodestyle.com\/en\/ferrariromackarkson\/","title":{"rendered":"Ferrari Roma: A Ferrari that\u2019s fun, not totally bonkers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u03c4\u03bf\u03c5 <\/em>Jeremy Clarkson<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s dive straight in, shall we. You\u2019ve all noted from the pictures that this week I\u2019m reviewing the Ferrari Roma, which is the cheapest Ferrari of them all, so I\u2019m guessing you don\u2019t want a five-hundred-word treatise on the origins of, say, trifle, followed by a sudden dogleg and then a few words on the car. Right. Happy to oblige. I took it over to see my friend Eric, who has owned many great Ferraris in the past. He knows the brand well.<\/p>\n

He knows the appeal. He also knows his cars \u2014 this is the man who produced the film Rush. So he climbed in, took one look at the digital dash and the complicated steering wheel, and then leapt straight outsaying: \u201cThey\u2019ve lost the plot.\u201d There\u2019s more. Ferrari is saying that the Roma is 70 percent new, but people with adenoids and way too much time on their hands have worked out that it has exactly the same wheelbase as the unloved Portofino, so they\u2019re saying that while 70 percent of the components may be new, the basic architecture of the car, and its engine, is not new at all. Others are suggesting that it was supposed to have been a Maserati but Fiatchanged its mind at the last minute and stuck a prancing horse on the back.<\/p>\n

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Everyone else I talked to, including one guy who\u2019s actually ordered one, said it looked very like an Aston Martin. It doesn\u2019t. It does, however, look extremely similar to an F-type Jaguar, which costs \u00a3100,000 less. In short, then, the Roma doesn\u2019t have much appeal to the mega Ferrari fans, it may not be what it says it is, and it isn\u2019t what you\u2019d call good value. However, I have been banging on for years that Ferrari is losing its way, that it\u2019s a hatmaker first and foremost, and that the cars it makes are way too big, way too powerful and really only suitable for the rich and famous in Saudi Arabia. Driving an 812 GTS in Britain is like trying to ride a cow through your local antiques shop.<\/p>\n

So I was rather looking forward to the Roma because it\u2019s small, and because its engine is not completely bonkers, and it\u2019s at the front, which is where Ferrari always used to put them in the glory days. And why should we criticize it for looking like an F-type Jag? Isn\u2019t that like saying about a woman: \u201cThe trouble is she looks too like Alicia Vikander\u201d? Then there\u2019s the price issue. Sure, at \u00a3170,000 it costs more than a Jag or a Porsche \u2014 and a hell of a lot more than a Ford Mustang \u2014 but that\u2019s OK if it has the Ferrari magic. And there\u2019s no way round this: it just does. When you turn the steering wheel, even if you\u2019re not going especially quickly, a combination of many things, both visual and sensual, causes the pit of your stomach to feel momentarily warm, as though everything is suddenly all right in the world. I know this is the sort of pretentious twaddle Grayson Perry uses to lose viewers but it really does happen. Well, it does to me. And then, when I changed down for an upcoming corner and the double-clutch gearbox did its thing, it happened again.<\/p>\n

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Oh, and when you put your foot down and there\u2019s a combination of sound and torque-driven fury, it\u2019s like you\u2019ve dived headfirst into a vat of dopamine after drinking three pints of serotonin. It feels different to other cars somehow: lighter, sharper, better. I discovered this unusualness when I first drove a Ferrari 355. And I\u2019ve experienced it a couple of times since, always when I\u2019m in a small V8-powered Ferrari. They are just so bloody exciting. And for once the power didn’t cause me to soil myself. In all the Ferraris I\u2019ve driven recently I\u2019ve put my foot down and then, driven by a healthy lust for self-preservation, I\u2019ve lifted it up again. I challenge anyone \u2014 and I include Lewis Hamilton in this definition of \u201canyone\u201d \u2014 to keep their foot down for more than two seconds in a modern V12 Ferrari on a typical British country road while in second or third gears. You can\u2019t.<\/p>\n

This means you\u2019re paying for all that engineering and all that capability and you can\u2019t use it. Whereas in the Roma you can. The twin-turbo V8 produces 612 horsepowers, which is a lot, but crucially you get only 560 torques. That\u2019s still a lot but it\u2019s not so much that you immediately hit a tree. It\u2019s fun power. So what we have here is a car that tickles your tickly bits, and roars the triumphant roar of flat-plane internal combustion, and on the stretch of road I use when I have a nice car it was wonderful. It\u2019s my kind of car, this. Maybe, and it\u2019s a big maybe, a mid-engined 488 would be a tiny bit more dirty, but in a 488 you\u2019d have to slow down for all of the crests or you\u2019d graunch the underside of its low nose. Whereas in a Roma you can keep right on going. As an all-around driving machine, then, it is fantastic. And it\u2019s not even remotely crash on poor surfaces. It glides.<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s practical too. Because the engine is in the front you get a decent-sized boot with a decent-sized opening, and back seats as well. I\u2019m not sure who exactly could ever use them, as even Richard Hammond would moan about being squashed, but they\u2019re useful storage spaces for smaller stuff. Babies, for example. Further forward there\u2019s a lot of clever-clever electronic interface stuff, with glass screens and haptic buttons and so forth, and I know this has gone down badly with some of my colleagues in the specialist motoring press. But I thought it all worked quite well. For once I didn\u2019t even mind having most of the controls on the steering wheel. It\u2019s still a stupid idea not to have stalks for the wipers and indicators, but at least in the Roma I\u2019d figured out the headlight dim\/dip operation after only three days of swearing.<\/p>\n

However, the whole thing then comes crashing down because of the seats. There\u2019s no proper lateral support no matter what you do with the controls, and you feel like you\u2019re sitting on them rather than in them. They are terrible. You\u2019d be better off ordering the car with none at all and using your kitchen chairs instead. Of course you can opt for sports seats instead, which, of course, brings me on to the other problem with this car. The crazy options list. You want the rear diffuser to be made from carbon fiber? Well, that\u2019s \u00a36,720. Two-tone leather is \u00a34,800. Foldable rear seats are \u00a3960. Basically, everything is an option, which is why the test car I drove would actually cost you just shy of \u00a3230,000. The Roma\u2019s good. Very good. It\u2019s elegant and subtle and pretty and fast and surprisingly practical. I really liked it, but at that price I\u2019m not sure I could bring myself actually to buy one.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u03c4\u03bf\u03c5 Jeremy Clarkson Let\u2019s dive straight in, shall we. You\u2019ve all noted from the pictures that this week I\u2019m reviewing the Ferrari Roma, which is the cheapest Ferrari of them all, so I\u2019m guessing you don\u2019t want a five-hundred-word treatise on the origins of, say, trifle, followed by a sudden dogleg and then a few […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":181585,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18496],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mancodestyle.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181583"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mancodestyle.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mancodestyle.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mancodestyle.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mancodestyle.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181583"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.mancodestyle.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181583\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mancodestyle.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/181585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mancodestyle.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mancodestyle.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mancodestyle.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}