Ferrari Almost Made the F80 a Single Seater. You Can Tell

Car seats are strange. In some vehicles, like dedicated sports cars that claim to support backseat passengers, they’re a borderline lie. “Shelf” would probably be a more accurate term. As for the uber-high-end set—to which I believe we can all agree the new Ferrari F80 belongs—the idea of passenger seating is a little funny. If you offered me a ride in yours, I obviously wouldn’t turn it down. But these vehicles exist to drive, not be driven in. They’re built for one purpose, and lugging an extra seat around as a full-time dead load kind of works against it.

So when I read today that Ferrari almost built the F80 as a single seater, as design chief Flavio Manzoni recently told Top Gear, my reaction was a hearty “As you should.”

“When we started the project, the idea had come out initially that this car should be a single seater,” Manzoni said. “Why? Because we wanted to make it have really extreme proportions, so a very narrow cabin, shoulders as wide as possible, a wide track and so on.”

That sounds cool, and it’s not hard to imagine how such a design might’ve drawn a more overt aesthetic link to Ferrari’s 499P Le Mans Hypercar and Vision Gran Turismo concept. Manzoni believes that with the final product, his team ultimately achieved the “effect of a real single-seater,” while still offering a spot for a companion. Good for them, but ultimately it’s not very surprising that the F80 started life in such a way because, well, have you seen its cabin?

I basically said as much when the car was revealed last week, but I’m not sure other automakers are allowed to call their multi-seat vehicles “driver-focused” anymore, now that the F80 exists. Ferrari’s latest flagship isn’t just centered around the driver; it’s actively hostile to the passenger. It doesn’t offer them a seat, so much as a bench carved into the firewall and a headrest, which honestly feels generous considering what’s below it. Ferrari evidently didn’t even feel obligated to upholster it in a color that stands apart from the rest of the dark Alcantara bunker.

Just looking at it makes me laugh, and wonder why one of the big, premier supercar makers hadn’t done something like this before. The McLaren F1’s passenger appointments were more like pods than full seats, too, and they didn’t come with headrests. (Gordon Murray eventually addressed that oversight with his GMA T.50.) But obviously, more thought had to be put into them given the three-abreast orientation, and they’re not indistinguishable from the ceiling in the way the F80’s extra “throne” is.

I think you pay for the F80’s joke of a passenger seat for the same reason you pay for wait staff to be assholes to you at Peter Luger’s. (Or so I’m told, I’ve never dined there.) It’s a part of the experience. At this echelon, it’s a mark of pride to not merely be catered to as the driver but favored to such a degree that it comes at the expense of the poor sap to your right. The F80 might technically offer seating for two, but Ferrari succeded in making it feel like one in spirit. If nothing else, it’s certainly one in comfort.

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