Gorgeous coupé looks to be a proper grand tourer with a front-mounted V8 and an obvious focus on usability
God bless whoever was brave enough to ask the question at the end of the monthly Ferrari ‘town hall’ meeting concerning exactly why it is that the company doesn’t make a car like the much-loved, big-selling Ferrari 550 Maranello anymore.Surely that must have been how the new Ferrari Roma came into being – not that the company is letting on. The 550 was one of Ferrari’s modern high watermarks for front-engined GTs. Smart-looking, usable, soulful, fast, involving and, most of all, really well sorted for the road, it was followed up by increasingly wild and expensive front-engined, twelve-cylinder successors that incrementally became less and less about everyday usability and accessible handling appeal and more and more about outright pace, grip, noise and lurid performance thrills as the years passed. The void that strategic shift left in the Ferrari model range has evidently taken some time to become apparent to the company, but we’ll let them off on that score.It was a bit of a mental leap to invoke the spirit of a car like the 550, not to mention so many other of the company’s V12 grand touring greats of the 1950s and 1960s, with a reimagined fixed-head version of the turbo V8-powered Ferrari Portofino M – itself not the most revered of modern Ferraris, after all.And yet what the related Roma proves is how much can be achieved through a handful of very well-chosen technical changes. The car has quite a rich and ritzy new-generation cockpit, too. And last but by no means least, it might be the most dazzling achievement yet of Ferrari’s own in-house Centro Stile design department. It’s an important new model addition, this – and not just for Ferrari, but with implications for the whole of its segment.