Classic Wheels
Gallery 1
First published in the September 2013 issue of Wheels magazine, Australia’s best car mag since 1953.
The Sea Cliff bridge perches at the end of a stunning strip of road. There aren’t many cars beautiful enough to match it. Here’s one…
IT FEELS like you’ve swallowed a solid, round, river rock, one that’s been lightly dusted with cocaine, like Pablo Escobar’s morning donut. People keep asking me, and that’s as close as I can get to describing what it’s like, how it feels, to drive the freakish Ferrari 458 Spider – it’s a kind of stomach-punched anxiety mixed with a surging elation.
Parachuting and suicidal ski runs are the only things I’ve done that come close.
Of course, that really describes what it feels like afterwards, as the fear-sweat slinks off you. While you’re in the driver’s seat it’s visceral and violent. There’s a thin scintilla of worry, based on the fact that this $587,951 car doesn’t belong to me and hurting it would be career-damaging, but there’s plenty of genuine fear for my wellbeing beneath that. For the first hour I kept finding myself arriving at corners while my brain was still a few seconds behind, wondering where its body went.
This is as good as driving gets. Hardcore and hard on the unwary. It’s hard to believe the only barrier to entry is a wallet as wide as the rear tyres.
“Sure, it’s great, but where would you actually use it?”
This is the other question that comes up a lot with this car, and besides the obvious answer of “everywhere, every chance I got”, our answer is the ribbon of road that runs south from Sydney, through the glorious Royal National Park and over the spectacular engineering monolith that is the Sea Cliff Bridge.
Pass through the entry gates, just south of Sydney’s white-walled Sutherland Shire, and you’re instantly into a downhill section of tightening 25 and 35km/h posted bends, which the 4.5-litre V8, 419kW Ferrari attacks with a kind of pinpoint-accurate savagery.
The steering of the 458 is not as instantly welcoming and chatty as that found in a Porsche; it feels sharper, more instantaneous and darty and, frankly, not as well weighted. But this is something you grow to appreciate, because it merely reflects the ethos of the car. Everything here happens faster than in other cars. I’d driven the awesome Audi R8 V10 Plus just a few days earlier, but this felt like stepping up from a go-kart to an F1 car.
It would be hard to speed in any normal car through these tightening bends, which make you feel like you’re tracing a Slinky, but the authorities have decided to make it a 60km/h zone anyway. It’s not a residential street, mind you, but this limit stays in place for the enticing climb up from the tranquil Audley Weir through eucalypt-scented gumtree forest. The bends are slightly faster here, and there are rock walls to bounce the screaming exhaust off, and back when the limit was, sensibly, 100km/h it would have been possible to sit on that speed the whole way up.
You get a first sniff of the ocean from up here, too, and relish in having the roof down as you cruise slowly and effortlessly, dropping a gear every now and then just for fun. There’s a valve that opens just behind your buttocks at 3000rpm, so you can enjoy the fruits of Ferrari ownership, even in traffic. That soundscape peaks much higher once you explore the rarefied air above 6000rpm, all the way to a back-smack gear change at 9000rpm.
I previous fell very heavily for the jet-fighter, teen-fantasy lines of the Lamborghini Aventador, but the 458 is simply sexier, and more stylish. The headlights alone are worthy of design awards, and possibly poetry. The size of the rear deck is gob-smacking and nothing at all spoils the purity of the whole sculpture, not even the centrally mounted rear exhausts, which I so despise on Boxsters. It’s a stunning car to follow, and a damn well intimidating one to see in your rear-view mirror. It looks angry and hot all at once, like Uma Thurman in Kill Bill.
The smell and sound of this detritus as it gets squashed down and spat out by the speeding Ferrari make you relish the fact that this is a convertible. It’s not as good as motorbike, although it feels almost as fast, but you do get that sense of being in the scenery, rather than just watching it scroll through your windscreen.
This fast, forested section is the best part of the road, with a range of short, sharp straights seeming like tunnels carved out of leaves, connecting a range of brilliant corners, with plenty of rise and fall between. Several times I found myself going what felt like too quickly in the bends, yet well within the car’s capabilities. Panic a little and lift off and the nose just tucks in and the whole thing tracks beautifully.
You come out of the Royal National Park, eventually, at Bald Hill Lookout, where a vast vista of coastline, with the seemingly tiny Sea Cliff Bridge in the distance, presents itself. Here, at the end of Lady Wakehurst Drive, you can watch the hang-gliders leaping off the cliff to what seems like certain death, but if you’re in the 458 Spider they’re just as likely to turn around and watch you instead.
It’s a short ride along Grand Pacific Drive, through another half-dozen downhill switchbacks then past the small but wealthy looking suburb of Coalcliff to Australia’s most spectacular bridge (sorry, Sydney Harbour Bridge, you’re overrated), which even made its way into the Shell/Ferrari TV commercial.
Most people drive slowly across here, with their jaws hanging slack, but being forced to do it some 28 times in a row for our deliriously happy snapper, I discovered that there’s something Mt Panorama-esque about the bridge, with a sharp left-right combination through a kind of unwinding concrete tunnel on the north entry that’s a joy to fire into, again and again. This creates a bit of a stir among the pedestrian tourists, who start sticking out their thumbs and shouting implorations at me. Eventually I stop and take a Fijian tourist for a blat, and then her husband, her brother and her son.
Being able to bring such delirious delight to complete strangers, even for just a few minutes, must be one of the real unexpected joys of ownership for Ferrari folk.
There’s just one more side track we need to explore on the way home; a favourite stretch of road testers called McKell Avenue that runs from the deepest dell of the National Park up to the exit at Waterfall.
It’s a stretch of tightening bends and longish straights that can tell you all you need to know about a car in a short period of time, and it’s patrolled regularly by a policeman who has a tattoo of a fish, a shotgun and a barrel on his forearm, and a sneer seemingly painted on his face. Again, inexplicably, this stretch is a 60 zone. Fortunately, today he finds us on the side of the road, the stone of sated excitement settling in my stomach.
“Ah, seems like a waste, really,” he groans.
Which sadly sums up one of our favourite roads. Back when it was the 100km/h zone it should still be, it was a driving playground. Today it’s a bit like having sex in a wetsuit; safe and squeaky clean, but a bit frustrating.
Fortunately, even just sitting in a Ferrari 458 Spider makes any road feel like heaven.
$211,413 in options – a new record?
The options fitted to our test Ferrari add up to a staggering $223,441, taking the total price to a face-smacking $811,392.
The list goes on, and on, but my two favourites are $10,450 for a car stereo that won’t stream music from your phone and the white paint job, with racing stripes, just $64,500. Ouch.
