Ferrari Roma Spider review

It’s the first fabric-topped, front-engined Ferrari for about 54 years (that’s enough alliteration – ed), and the five-layer automatic soft-top is finished in a bird’s eye fabric that catches the light and shines like a shark-skin suit. Ferrari says it has built an all-new chassis, which isn’t entirely true, but the sill sections are stronger, the rear floor and the windscreen pillars are beefed up and there are a series of changes to the top of the B pillars just behind the doors.

It all adds 84kg to the kerb weight, which is enough to affect the handling. The car also isn’t as strong or resistant to twisting as the coupé, which is exactly what you would expect when you cut the roof off. Ferrari claims the Spider has lost 30 per cent of its torsional stiffness, which strikes me as rather a lot.

The 1556kg claimed dry weight is only available with a load of carbon fibre trim bits, which will add around 25 grand to the price. The basic version of the Spider will weigh nearer to 1.7 tonnes by the time you press the starter…

Climb in and the seats are wide and firm, but comfortable, although they’re not fantastically supportive should your definition of La Dolce Vita involve travelling a bit faster. The pedal box is plenty wide enough, but those with large feet will find their toe caps brushing against unseen under-dash bracketry. Views out are fine over the W-shaped bonnet, but the windscreen pillars are huge and block your view as you turn into a corner.

Those barely-there rear seats are the fiction we tell ourselves when we talk about a two-plus-two, but apparently when Ferrari offered a rear parcel shelf instead of the vestigial perches, no one took it up.

The instrument cluster is still Ferrari’s cheerful chaotic carnival of colours, lights and baffling switches, which you have to learn very carefully. The steering wheel buttons, for example, require you to ‘wake’ them with another, erm, steering wheel button. This is the first ever Ferrari to adopt the mandated lane keeping assistance from the dead hand of the European Commission safety gnomes. You’ll be pleased to hear it’s relatively easy to switch off. The centre touch screen is quite simple, but it’s a shame that Ferrari has buried the heating and ventilation in there as well, which takes your eyes off the road for too long.

Don’t be planning too much luggage if you’re travelling al fresco, as the furled hood cuts the tiny 255-litre boot space in half. Perhaps those useless rear seats do have a purpose after all.

Press the starter and the engine awakes with a growling basso profundo like a sleeping bulldog, but there are no shrieks or explosive booms to wake the neighbours. The 3855cc, 90-degree splayed, quad-cam, twin-turbo V8 is a straight lift from the coupé and differs from the Portofino motor in many aspects, most specifically its high-lift cams, hollow valves and faster spinning turbos. So too is the eight-speed twin-wet-clutch gearbox, which originally comes from the SF90 Stradale rather than the Portofino, and which has been fitted with slightly longer seventh and eighth gear ratios to suit the more relaxed progress expected in the drophead.

Tug on the right-hand paddle and you’ll find yourself in auto mode, which is how the car pulls away. Again, the gearbox logic is all Ferrari’s – so not very logical at all. There’s a series of sliders on the transmission tunnel to engage reverse, auto and drive, but you need to pull both steering wheel paddles to get it out of reverse and into neutral, or to lock the transmission, and the park brake is hidden down by your right or left knee.

There are different suspension rates and settings for the electrically powered steering system, plus an optional (£3390) magnetorheological damper set up – fitted to our car. Pulling away, the ride feels compliant, especially if you engage the ‘bumpy road’ setting, but on Sardinia’s broken blacktop the big 20-inch Bridgestones clout the sharp-edged bumps, there’s a fair bit of transverse weight transfer so your head nods from side to side, and the scuttle shakes noticeably on minor bumps, especially in the middle of a corner.

The gearing is long to the point of being questionable and the electronics don’t allow much of a kickdown, so your initial impression is of a rather slow and a slow-to-react car. Putting it in Sport with the bumpy road function on and using the steering wheel paddles feels more like it, although the engine sounds like a flight of bumble bees that strayed into an echo chamber. The throttle is long-travel and you need to have your leather sole near the firewall when pressing on, but even if it comes across as smooth as La Dolce Vita star Marcello Mastroianni, it’s also seriously fast. It’s just that the performance exists at the end of the map where the markings show ‘here be dragons’.

The huge brakes scrub off the speed effectively, however, and the pedal is progressive and intuitive – just as long as your feet aren’t entangled under the dashboard.

As to the handling, there’s grip aplenty and a very good set of electronics together with an electronically actuated limited-slip differential to keep you on the black stuff. I thought the original coupé had quite slow and occasionally numb steering when turning in and the Spider’s helm feels even more so. Turn the wheel and there’s a microsecond before you get a yawing sensation and a microsecond later the weight comes in and tries to push the nose wide. It doesn’t always react in the same way – sometimes a turn of the wheel elicits a magnificent sweep into the bend, at others it’s a thrupenny bit response. You modify your driving to suit and when you do it’s effective and fast, but I have to say it’s more fun at  7/10ths than 8/10ths or above.

This car is not without its faults, then, but at a brisk canter with the roof down and the effective air deflector keeping you out of the worst drafts, it is a delightful, comfortable and pretty classy way of putting miles on. If I were as wealthy as my dreams, I’d wait for the Aston Martin DB12 Volante, but to be honest, the Roma Spider is probably the better looking car and you know there’ll be not much in it between the two. La Dolce Vita indeed.