Yahoo Autos The 1184-HP Ferrari F80 Is Twice the F40 and Then Some
Ferrari has just revealed its new Formula 1–inspired supercar, the 2026 Ferrari F80, which is fifth in a line of halo cars that runs from the 288GTO to the LaFerrari.
The F80 has a V-6 and three electric motors for a total of 1184 horsepower.
Only 799 will be built, and they will start reaching U.S. customers in early 2026.
Outside Ferrari's E-Building, there's a red-painted chimney that marks the maximum height that any Ferrari building can stand. The policy is a nod to the town of Maranello, Italy, and Ferrari's reluctance to physically dominate the place that it defines in so many ways.
It's a counterintuitive landmark, because we don't tend to think of Ferrari as humble. Especially when it comes to the Ferrari supercars—the ones more super than the rest—that ran from the 288GTO to the LaFerrari. There are only five such cars, all built in low volumes and meant to showcase the F1-inspired performance of their eras. To that short but illustrious list we add the 2026 F80, an 1184-hp embodiment of everything Ferrari knows about street-legal performance. Send some red smoke out that chimney, because this is an event.
Power Change
While the F80's two immediate predecessors, the Enzo and LaFerrari, used V-12s, the F80's internal-combustion engine is a 3.0-liter V-6 with a 9200-rpm rev limit. Why? Because Formula 1 uses V-6s right now, and Ferrari sees its 120-degree V-6 as its flagship powerplant—this car cares not for nostalgia. And anyway, this isn't the V-6 from your cousin Willy's Chevy Cavalier Z24. With zero-lag assistance from its electric turbochargers, it makes 888 horsepower and 627 pound-feet of torque all on its own. Another 296 hp is delivered by a trio of electric motors, with two on the front axle (enabling torque vectoring) and one sandwiched between the engine and eight-speed dual-clutch automatic transmission.
But, strangely enough for a car with 1184 horsepower, the four-figure output isn't even the F80's dominant stat.
We'd say that honor goes to the downforce figure, which is outlandish: 2315 pounds of downforce at 155 mph. How does a car that looks so clean and sleek generate more downforce than big-winged mutants like the McLaren Senna and Dodge Viper ACR? Well, there's active aero, with that rear wing hoisting up and angling into the slipstream at 11 degrees in high downforce mode. And there's everything you can't see, under the car—the carefully shaped carbon-fiber floorpan, the sprawling rear diffuser.
It's cliché to say that any given supercar is an F1 car with fenders, but when you see the F80's underbody by itself, mounted on a wall, it looks like it belongs to an open-wheel car.
Either that or it's the molted carapace of some extraterrestrial creature that you don't want to meet. In a world of tidy overhangs, about the first two and a half feet of the F80 is dedicated to cooling and downforce, with air channelled from under the car up over the windshield—essentially, the front end is a huge wing in disguise.
And it's a singular visage, with a black mask across the hood and headlights that defies anthropomorphic interpretation. Ferrari chief design officer Flavio Bertoni says that he deliberately avoided the humanoid look of "two eyes, one mouth" imparted by headlights and a grille in favor of something much stranger and compelling. "Sci-fi is an inspiration for this car," he says.
Active Suspension
That aversion to a conventional approaches extends to the suspension, which is tasked with seemingly incompatible goals: offering a comfortable ride while coping with race-car downforce at high speeds. How do you plan for the invisible elephant that takes a seat on the roof at 150 mph? Ferrari promises it has solved this dilemma with Multimatic's 48-volt active suspension, which can relax on a low-speed speed drive or firm up to compensate for the ton-plus of downforce at high speed. The system also strives to keep the car's aerodynamic elements working to best effect by maintaining whichever attitude and ride height are maximally advantageous for a given situation.
On a related front, there's no way for the driver to manually deploy the rear wing—the car knows best, and it will send it up when it's needed, but that will be at 37 mph or beyond. So if you want to do some high-downforce-mode peacocking on 17 Mile Drive and A1A, you'll need to maintain a certain pace. If you're in a low-drag mood, tucking in the wing allows for a claimed 217-mph top speed. And that's electronically limited.
Room for Two Lucky Humans
The thrills of the F80's gaudy performance—62 mph arrives in a claimed 2.15 seconds, and 124 mph in 5.75 seconds—can be shared by two lucky humans, but Ferrari insists that there was a debate over that. Essentially, on one side there was the race-car romantic ideal of a single-seater, and on the other side, reality. As selfish as any of us are, we enjoy company when driving in outrageous cars, and Ferrari's upper-crust clientele is no different. So the F80 is a two-seater, of course, but it's an unusual one in that the driver's seat and the passenger's seat are slightly offset.
The passenger sits rearward, belted in atop padding added to the carbon tub, while the driver sits forward and gets an adjustable seat, distinctions that should effectively make the point about who paid for the car. A six-footer fits in the passenger's seat, but it's tight. The driver's seat can accommodate taller people than that, but probably not too much taller, especially if there are plans to wear a helmet.
The interior asymmetry is subtle, intended to place hips and shoulders on slightly different planes, but we're talking about a couple of inches here—the cockpit is two inches narrower than that of the LaFerrari. We'd guess that taller drivers could probably ask for the passenger-side treatment (using the tub as the seat), since the rear bulkhead is the same on both sides. The passenger side of the tub is shorter at the foot box, even though there appears to be empty space ahead of the footwell, but oh well—no F80 rides in store for Victor Wembanyama.
Special Treatment for the Wheels
Perhaps sufficiently cashed-up customers could negotiate alternative seating arrangements, but they can't get center-lock versions of the F80's wheels. And there's a good reason for that: center-locks wouldn't add performance. Chief design officer Manzoni wanted five-spoke wheels for aesthetic reasons, while chief product development officer Gianmaria Fulgenzi wanted carbon-fiber wheels for maximum performance. And it was hard enough to build five-spoke carbon wheels that could cope with the forces imposed by the F80, never mind making them center-lock. So the F80 has five-lug hubs, which also means you could change a tire without using a three-foot torque wrench.
Keeping a set of fresh tires on hand might be a good idea for owners who plan on exercising Boost Optimization mode, which maps a track and then automatically deploys maximum electrical assist where it's most needed. Wouldn't it do that anyway, you ask? No, because the high-voltage battery is relatively small—2.3 kWh—so if you're going for a qualifying lap, you'd want to draw it down as much as possible. Which is exactly what happens when you're in qualifying mode on a track. At least, after your first recon lap.
Ferrari Forever
Speaking of the battery, Ferrari is cognizant of the finite life span of batteries, and it has a plan to address that issue. With a program it's calling "Ferrari Forever," the company plans to offer high-voltage replacement batteries for decades to come. Already, there is a replacement LaFerrari battery designed to fit the old case and specifications—albeit with newer cell technology inside. So worry not, F80 buyers, for Ferrari won't leave your heirs scavenging junkyards like Mad Max extras, looking for cast-off high-voltage cells.
And this is also good news for the rest of us, who might daydream about a nice Ferrari financing deal—maybe at the beginning of 2026, when F80s will begin arriving in the U.S. Say you walk into your Ferrari dealer, they've got zero-percent financing for Presidents Day, and you've got $500 a month to spend on a new toy.
Well, good news: You'll own that F80 free and clear in barely more than 483 years. Ferrari forever.
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