Ferrari tells us its four-door Purosangue is definitely not an SUV, which raises some questions... like what is it and what’s the competition?
WORDS OLLIE MARRIAGE PHOTOGRAPHY JONNY FLEETWOOD
An SUV with a nose lift. Well, that’s a new one on me. But then this isn’t an SUV, is it? It’s an FUV. Ferrari Utility Vehicle. God it’s hard not to make fun of Ferrari sometimes. Not that you need to when it comes up with this stuff itself.
FUV?! Ho, ho, ho. Nose lift?! Ha, ha, ha. And it charges how much for it?! He, he, he.
Well, £313,360. Funny, provided you’re not the one laying down the folding. And it gets better. This one, as it sits here, is £411,619. A Porsche 911 of options – £4,109 of that is the nose lift. No, seriously, it is. Ferrari doesn’t joke about these things. That’s why the number is so exact – it has calculated precisely what it can get away with. I mean you’ve got to be enormously wealthy before an uplift like that stops hurting, haven’t you?
The trouble with Ferrari is you often come away feeling that the joke is somehow on you. “Look,” you want to say, “it’s just a Lamborghini Urus rival, how can you possibly get away with charging twice as much for it?” Pointless question. A two-year waiting list tells you all you need to know. So only one question actually matters: if you could, would you?
And here’s the thing, and it’s a thing that has surprised me. I would. I really would. OK, few caveats around that, but I will say this: I would rather drive this than a Roma. Maybe even an SF90. It is absolutely bloody, annoyingly, irritatingly, brilliant. And it’s not an SUV. It really isn’t. It is something different.
But not something entirely new. It’s basically a GTC4Lusso with a lift kit. Look at the profile, the silhouette above the shoulder line. See what I mean? And the relationship with the sadly defunct shooting brake goes more than skin deep – this also has a V12 and uses the same power take-off from the front of the engine to deliver torque to the front wheels. But let’s not dwell on the
technical make-up too long. What you need to know is this. The aluminium chassis is all new and 25 per cent stiffer than the GTC4Lusso and it has magic suspension. That’s not what Ferrari calls it, it’s named it Ferrari Active Suspension
