First Drive: 2012 Ferrari 458 Spider [w/video]
In Which We Fight The Urge To Name It “World’s Best Car”
When looking for exotic sports car thrills on public roads in the summer, it simply doesn’t get any better than the . How nice, too, that Italy’s summer has gone on and on this year – it thoughtfully didn’t end until the evening after our epic drive through the Apennine mountains. Our mostly sun-drenched route started at around 500 feet above sea level in Maranello, climbing to near 3,200 feet over Passo della Cisa, finishing the outbound portion on a deserted sandy beach in northernmost Tuscany. Then, instead of taking the suggested direct route back along the three-lane autostrade, we chose to retrace our steps over Passo della Cisa on the amazing S 62 two-lane highway where Enzo Ferrari competed in his very first road race back in 1919. It was a very appropriate 300 miles in paradise.
The all-aluminum 2012 Ferrari 458 Spider is built primarily at the Scaglietti facility in Modena, and the rakish drophead is scheduled to arrive in North America by mid-February carrying a base price of $257,000. Rather surprisingly, our mountain hop reveals that the Spider possesses perhaps an even better sum of its parts than does the . Certainly, either body configuration fairly thrashes anything the old F430 lineup was ever capable of.
To be fair, when compared side by side with the coupe, the Spider weighs some 110 pounds more at 3,384 lbs., and its overall structure is said to be 30 percent less rigid. Regardless, just as we have shamed the Italia’s estimated 3.3-second run from 0-60 by recording our own 3.0-second zap, the Spider loses practically nothing to the coupe, and we’re quite sure of being able to punch through to a 3.1-second time despite cheeky estimates of “<3.3″.
2011, 3.0, 3.1, 3D, Bing, Car, Coupe, Enzo, Italy, photo, Photos, review, SIM, Spider, Time, Video
