Uncovering the development of the FX's design
(from Ferrari Owners Site)
In the run-up to the publication on these pages of a full technical appraisal of the new FX on its official launch, the Owners’ Site grabbed the opportunity of asking Ingegner Lorenzo Ramaciotti, the head of Pininfarina’s Research and Development centre based in Cambiano on the outskirts of Turin, to provide owners with an insight into the design work that has gone into Ferrari’s stunning new flagship model.
Ingegner Lorenzo Ramaciotti has worked for Pininfarina in Turin for nigh on 30 years, graduating in Mechanical Engineering from the Turin Polytechnic in 1972 before joining the Turin coachbuilder as a designer in 1973. A professional career brought about in no small way by the fact that he was born and bred in the very heart of Italy’s supercar territory – Modena.
As Ramaciotti explains, “Although my father actually worked for a bank, cars were the family passion and there were always interesting cars around the house. My father used to take me to see the Mille Miglia as a boy and one of his school friends happened to be Omer Orsi, the owner of the Maserati factory that was situated just 500 yards from our house. I still have some photos of my father next to the famous ‘Dama Bianca’ (White Lady) prototype of the Touring 3500 GT which had been nicknamed after a famous personality of that time – the lover of the famous Italian cyclist, Fausto Coppi.
“And I was born just a few hundred yards from the headquarters of the Scuderia Ferrari on Corso Trento Trieste, right in the heart of the automotive engineering heart of Modena. But rather than for engines, my own passion focused on bodywork and chassis – in other words, not on engine tuning. So I chose to study at the Turin Polytechnic which was famous for its mechanical engineering course – at the time in Italy, there weren’t any specialist schools for car designers.
“Even so, I think the engine is a source of inspiration for anyone in this business. It’s hard to find a car designer or someone who works in the field of automotive design who is not driven by their passion for cars. I certainly had that passion – I used to take part in all the related competitions and was forever doodling designs on books like school boys do – but, compared to others with the same interest, I was lucky enough to start working for Pininfarina and was able to grow professionally designing Ferraris.”
The FX design brief
“Working with Ferrari, design briefs concentrate on creating a tendency; they involve important creative themes rather than details. Unlike other larger manufacturers, Ferrari doesn’t base its requests on market analysis across the five continents. A Ferrari is such a specialist car that it relies as much on the emotional perception of the people behind the project as on a wish-list from potential clients. A Ferrari is always more influenced by the factory’s own vision, which is one of things that makes a Ferrari fascinating – it’s conceived in an almost ‘old-fashioned’ manner even if we are talking about extremely modern, innovative, cutting-edge models that look to the future. But you can feel the influence of the people who created them.
“In this instance, the brief was basically to forget the past and take a step into the future. It was to give those who have already bought an F50 a reason to justify buying an FX to go alongside it. In other words to produce a car that was so much more advanced than the F50 – visually as well as in its performance – that it would be a clean break with the past and a trend-setter for the future, totally without compromise. It was therefore to have an aggressive, almost brutal design; something with the strength to underline Ferrari’s role as leading producer of high-performance sports cars – a pure thoroughbred, a car with a very strong character.
“Clearly, as the design progressed, it was our intention to visually underline the link with Formula 1; a link that was already a forceful technological reality thanks to the materials to be used in construction, the technologies used during development and the aerodynamics which are all heavily influenced by Formula 1 experience.”
The FX package
“When it come to packaging, this kind of in-line V12 supercar, like the F50 before it, has an unusual layout of its volumes, because the driver sits quite a way forward and the engine bay is very long. The result is a very cab-forward appearance with a long rear flank. A part of our job involves interpreting those volumes in an attractive manner. In certain cases it’s sufficient to give the volumes oversized dimensions to create an innovative feel, because while the line is very important in a design, it is also a question of creating balanced volumes.
“Having said that there are a number of radical differences between the F50 and FX. The first is the type of car – the FX is a pure berlinetta and is therefore a closed coupé. The F50’s convertible nature (barchetta or coupé) brought with it a series of limitations and complications in the design.
“The second is the position of the front radiators which, like on the 360 Modena, are placed at the sides of the nose allowing us to completely reinterpret the frontal section. On the one side there’s a more extreme evolution of the concept seen on the 360 – with two lateral air intakes and a higher central section which feeds the aerodynamic underbody – and on the other the optimisation of the aerodynamics that allowed us to integrate the sharp, F1-style nose in a functional way. This is thus not a simple styling cue such as that used by other manufacturers on front-engined cars – on the FX the nose cone has a functional role dividing the air flow between the upper surface and the underbody, and that which is fed to the radiators.
Another difference is how we have worked on the ergonomics of actually getting in and out of the car, making access easier than on other similar cars. Hence the ‘butterfly’ doors that use twin hinges, rather like on the 512 M. It wasn’t a question of coming up with a system that just looked good – it was a functional solution to a very real problem. With this system, the door aperture opens right the way down to the bottom of the car, doing away with the usual wide sill which, a norm on such mid-engined cars, tends to restrict ease of access due to the seats being positioned quite close together in the middle of the car to clear the low roof, forcing the passengers to squeeze themselves through the aperture.
“On the other hand, it’s not possible to have a very low-cut aperture on a traditional car door, because with cars with such a low ride height, the door would catch on the pavement when parked. Having the door swing upwards, instead, means we could incorporate the whole of the lower outer sill section in the door itself, making the sill narrower. Similarly, the roof section is cut away allowing passengers to lower themselves directly onto the seats from above.
“A further difference lies in the underbody. When we chose not to use a full rear spoiler, considerable research went into creating the same values of downforce we could have achieved using a wing by working on the underbody and on small aerodynamic appendages. On both the F40 and F50 the rear wing was an integral part of the cars’ design: the design of the whole of the flank and the balance of the volumes had to take the visual mass of the rear into consideration. Doing away with the rear spoiler meant reinterpreting the rear mass and volumes, radically changing the car’s appearance.
“In fact, the FX was conceived without integral spoilers right from the start. We had abandoned that as a solution because we wanted to give the car a far more compact and cleaner line than the F50. Which also tied in with the rest of the Ferrari range, because none of the production cars have additional spoilers. From the 550 Maranello on, the cars’ aerodynamics have always been developed with absolute discretion in mind.
“One of the most important innovations Ferrari introduced on the FX was active aerodynamics. Both the discreet rear spoiler and the spoilers incorporated on the underbody actually move in relation to the car’s speed. Above a certain speed they reach a position where they generate maximum downforce and then, when the speed rises further, they lower gradually to reduce drag without reducing the downforce, which increases exponentially with speed. In addition, the spoilers positioned near the front wheelarches make active use of the aerodynamic charge created by the wheels spinning.”
The transfer of Ferrari’s F1 skills and aerodynamics
“A Formula 1 car, with its open wheels and flat underbody, is subject to a number of design constraints that make it a unique reality. What, however, links the FX to F1 is the use of certain instruments, such as the use of the rolling road wind tunnel throughout development to replicate road conditions, especially in the area closest to the road surface, just like Ferrari does in F1. Then there are the processes involved – the fact in itself of determining aesthetic and technical solutions on the basis of aerodynamic requirements, and undertaking highly sophisticated aerodynamic research right from day one and the first styling sketches, right up to the road test development.
“The third is the care taken over details. Formula 1 cars today have become so sophisticated that just adding a small nolder or a tiny flap can make a huge difference to performance. In the case of the FX, it is this maniacal attention to detail – the fact of finding extra downforce by using the area ahead of the front wheels, for example – that perfectly reflects the philosophy used in F1. The use of the underbody as an active element in the car’s aerodynamics is conceptually derived directly from F1, and some of the forms of the FX’s air intakes and extractors – such as the extractors on the rear engine cover – closely recall Ferrari’s experience in F1.
“When discussing the car’s layout, we were continually in contact with Ferrari’s aerodynamics engineers so that we could avoid proposing design solutions that would not directly bring about good aerodynamic performance. It’s a continual, two-pronged effort reconciling the technical requests with styling requirements.”
Styling
“There are a number of cues that recall earlier Ferrari models, but they are just details – rather like signatures. For example, the rear cut of the front wheelarch recalls that of the F40; the rear intake resembles roughly the Testarossa with large rakes to cut up the mass of air, and the shape of the rear C pillar is similar to that of the 250 GT Berlinetta (SWB).
“Where the FX differs greatly from the F50 is in the surface treatment. The F50 had soft, fluid, rounded forms with very few angles whereas the FX has a marked edginess to its design. Apart from there currently being a tendency away from earlier softer ‘bio’ styles, the FX is more influenced by the treatment used on, say the nosecone of a F1 car, or by other competition cars, such as the cars raced at Le Mans. These all feature very defined, geometric cuts for aerodynamic purposes, and this is the same treatment used on the FX.
“The rear tail lights – round, as usual – have been dealt with unusually in that, instead of being integrated into the surrounding bodywork, we left them on the surface of the rear wheelarches where they have become three-dimensional objects in their own right, rather like they were on the Rossa prototype, but more extreme.
“Something that would have been possible at the beginning, but which we didn’t do, was to incorporate an air scoop on the roof. For starters, the car became too high and it seemed a bit of a caricature of a F1 car. In addition, it would have notably reduced visibility through the rear screen. An alternative we looked at in early sketches was to incorporate air intakes alongside the roof, but from some angles they looked really odd! Hence we returned to the classic side air intakes.
“I always say that designing a car means finding the best compromise between a series of constraints, even when one is designing an extreme performance car that will only be produced in a few hundred examples, like the FX.
“Hence certain styling choices are also technological solutions. For example, the FX’s wheels (18” front and 19” rear in forged aluminium) had to be as light as possible to reduce unsprung masses. A design with cuts in the spokes themselves was imposed as a technical constraint by the wheel manufacturer, because it’s the best way to make them lighter, rendering the casting process easier. In this way, there are two points where the mould can be injected for each spoke and this area can thus be reduced in section to make them very thin without compromising structural rigidity."
The future
We closed our fascinating in-depth discussion with Ing. Ramaciotti with the question of how he would envisage Ferrari’s next supercar from a designer’s standpoint.
“Well, we’ve only just finished working on this one! Obviously I would want it to be better and even more advanced than the FX! I believe that, in the past, Pininfarina has come up with some truly beautiful designs, such as the 456 GT the 550 Maranello and the 360 Modena. The F355 was also a fantastic car because. I hope that when we'll be talking about the next supercar, technology will provide us with problems to resolve that will lead to the creation of new styles and shapes.
"I refer especially to the ability of designers to work keeping in mind the performance goals they want to reach, and the technologies that will permit the attainment of those objectives. Having progressed, for example, from tubular steel chassis to carbon-fibre radically changed the way this kind of car is designed. I would like to think that something else of similar importance will come along and make us change how we design cars so that we can create even more unusual shapes.”
** reproduced without permission **
[This message has been edited by cojones (edited 13 June 2002).]
(from Ferrari Owners Site)
In the run-up to the publication on these pages of a full technical appraisal of the new FX on its official launch, the Owners’ Site grabbed the opportunity of asking Ingegner Lorenzo Ramaciotti, the head of Pininfarina’s Research and Development centre based in Cambiano on the outskirts of Turin, to provide owners with an insight into the design work that has gone into Ferrari’s stunning new flagship model.
Ingegner Lorenzo Ramaciotti has worked for Pininfarina in Turin for nigh on 30 years, graduating in Mechanical Engineering from the Turin Polytechnic in 1972 before joining the Turin coachbuilder as a designer in 1973. A professional career brought about in no small way by the fact that he was born and bred in the very heart of Italy’s supercar territory – Modena.
As Ramaciotti explains, “Although my father actually worked for a bank, cars were the family passion and there were always interesting cars around the house. My father used to take me to see the Mille Miglia as a boy and one of his school friends happened to be Omer Orsi, the owner of the Maserati factory that was situated just 500 yards from our house. I still have some photos of my father next to the famous ‘Dama Bianca’ (White Lady) prototype of the Touring 3500 GT which had been nicknamed after a famous personality of that time – the lover of the famous Italian cyclist, Fausto Coppi.
“And I was born just a few hundred yards from the headquarters of the Scuderia Ferrari on Corso Trento Trieste, right in the heart of the automotive engineering heart of Modena. But rather than for engines, my own passion focused on bodywork and chassis – in other words, not on engine tuning. So I chose to study at the Turin Polytechnic which was famous for its mechanical engineering course – at the time in Italy, there weren’t any specialist schools for car designers.
“Even so, I think the engine is a source of inspiration for anyone in this business. It’s hard to find a car designer or someone who works in the field of automotive design who is not driven by their passion for cars. I certainly had that passion – I used to take part in all the related competitions and was forever doodling designs on books like school boys do – but, compared to others with the same interest, I was lucky enough to start working for Pininfarina and was able to grow professionally designing Ferraris.”
The FX design brief
“Working with Ferrari, design briefs concentrate on creating a tendency; they involve important creative themes rather than details. Unlike other larger manufacturers, Ferrari doesn’t base its requests on market analysis across the five continents. A Ferrari is such a specialist car that it relies as much on the emotional perception of the people behind the project as on a wish-list from potential clients. A Ferrari is always more influenced by the factory’s own vision, which is one of things that makes a Ferrari fascinating – it’s conceived in an almost ‘old-fashioned’ manner even if we are talking about extremely modern, innovative, cutting-edge models that look to the future. But you can feel the influence of the people who created them.
“In this instance, the brief was basically to forget the past and take a step into the future. It was to give those who have already bought an F50 a reason to justify buying an FX to go alongside it. In other words to produce a car that was so much more advanced than the F50 – visually as well as in its performance – that it would be a clean break with the past and a trend-setter for the future, totally without compromise. It was therefore to have an aggressive, almost brutal design; something with the strength to underline Ferrari’s role as leading producer of high-performance sports cars – a pure thoroughbred, a car with a very strong character.
“Clearly, as the design progressed, it was our intention to visually underline the link with Formula 1; a link that was already a forceful technological reality thanks to the materials to be used in construction, the technologies used during development and the aerodynamics which are all heavily influenced by Formula 1 experience.”
The FX package
“When it come to packaging, this kind of in-line V12 supercar, like the F50 before it, has an unusual layout of its volumes, because the driver sits quite a way forward and the engine bay is very long. The result is a very cab-forward appearance with a long rear flank. A part of our job involves interpreting those volumes in an attractive manner. In certain cases it’s sufficient to give the volumes oversized dimensions to create an innovative feel, because while the line is very important in a design, it is also a question of creating balanced volumes.
“Having said that there are a number of radical differences between the F50 and FX. The first is the type of car – the FX is a pure berlinetta and is therefore a closed coupé. The F50’s convertible nature (barchetta or coupé) brought with it a series of limitations and complications in the design.
“The second is the position of the front radiators which, like on the 360 Modena, are placed at the sides of the nose allowing us to completely reinterpret the frontal section. On the one side there’s a more extreme evolution of the concept seen on the 360 – with two lateral air intakes and a higher central section which feeds the aerodynamic underbody – and on the other the optimisation of the aerodynamics that allowed us to integrate the sharp, F1-style nose in a functional way. This is thus not a simple styling cue such as that used by other manufacturers on front-engined cars – on the FX the nose cone has a functional role dividing the air flow between the upper surface and the underbody, and that which is fed to the radiators.
Another difference is how we have worked on the ergonomics of actually getting in and out of the car, making access easier than on other similar cars. Hence the ‘butterfly’ doors that use twin hinges, rather like on the 512 M. It wasn’t a question of coming up with a system that just looked good – it was a functional solution to a very real problem. With this system, the door aperture opens right the way down to the bottom of the car, doing away with the usual wide sill which, a norm on such mid-engined cars, tends to restrict ease of access due to the seats being positioned quite close together in the middle of the car to clear the low roof, forcing the passengers to squeeze themselves through the aperture.
“On the other hand, it’s not possible to have a very low-cut aperture on a traditional car door, because with cars with such a low ride height, the door would catch on the pavement when parked. Having the door swing upwards, instead, means we could incorporate the whole of the lower outer sill section in the door itself, making the sill narrower. Similarly, the roof section is cut away allowing passengers to lower themselves directly onto the seats from above.
“A further difference lies in the underbody. When we chose not to use a full rear spoiler, considerable research went into creating the same values of downforce we could have achieved using a wing by working on the underbody and on small aerodynamic appendages. On both the F40 and F50 the rear wing was an integral part of the cars’ design: the design of the whole of the flank and the balance of the volumes had to take the visual mass of the rear into consideration. Doing away with the rear spoiler meant reinterpreting the rear mass and volumes, radically changing the car’s appearance.
“In fact, the FX was conceived without integral spoilers right from the start. We had abandoned that as a solution because we wanted to give the car a far more compact and cleaner line than the F50. Which also tied in with the rest of the Ferrari range, because none of the production cars have additional spoilers. From the 550 Maranello on, the cars’ aerodynamics have always been developed with absolute discretion in mind.
“One of the most important innovations Ferrari introduced on the FX was active aerodynamics. Both the discreet rear spoiler and the spoilers incorporated on the underbody actually move in relation to the car’s speed. Above a certain speed they reach a position where they generate maximum downforce and then, when the speed rises further, they lower gradually to reduce drag without reducing the downforce, which increases exponentially with speed. In addition, the spoilers positioned near the front wheelarches make active use of the aerodynamic charge created by the wheels spinning.”
The transfer of Ferrari’s F1 skills and aerodynamics
“A Formula 1 car, with its open wheels and flat underbody, is subject to a number of design constraints that make it a unique reality. What, however, links the FX to F1 is the use of certain instruments, such as the use of the rolling road wind tunnel throughout development to replicate road conditions, especially in the area closest to the road surface, just like Ferrari does in F1. Then there are the processes involved – the fact in itself of determining aesthetic and technical solutions on the basis of aerodynamic requirements, and undertaking highly sophisticated aerodynamic research right from day one and the first styling sketches, right up to the road test development.
“The third is the care taken over details. Formula 1 cars today have become so sophisticated that just adding a small nolder or a tiny flap can make a huge difference to performance. In the case of the FX, it is this maniacal attention to detail – the fact of finding extra downforce by using the area ahead of the front wheels, for example – that perfectly reflects the philosophy used in F1. The use of the underbody as an active element in the car’s aerodynamics is conceptually derived directly from F1, and some of the forms of the FX’s air intakes and extractors – such as the extractors on the rear engine cover – closely recall Ferrari’s experience in F1.
“When discussing the car’s layout, we were continually in contact with Ferrari’s aerodynamics engineers so that we could avoid proposing design solutions that would not directly bring about good aerodynamic performance. It’s a continual, two-pronged effort reconciling the technical requests with styling requirements.”
Styling
“There are a number of cues that recall earlier Ferrari models, but they are just details – rather like signatures. For example, the rear cut of the front wheelarch recalls that of the F40; the rear intake resembles roughly the Testarossa with large rakes to cut up the mass of air, and the shape of the rear C pillar is similar to that of the 250 GT Berlinetta (SWB).
“Where the FX differs greatly from the F50 is in the surface treatment. The F50 had soft, fluid, rounded forms with very few angles whereas the FX has a marked edginess to its design. Apart from there currently being a tendency away from earlier softer ‘bio’ styles, the FX is more influenced by the treatment used on, say the nosecone of a F1 car, or by other competition cars, such as the cars raced at Le Mans. These all feature very defined, geometric cuts for aerodynamic purposes, and this is the same treatment used on the FX.
“The rear tail lights – round, as usual – have been dealt with unusually in that, instead of being integrated into the surrounding bodywork, we left them on the surface of the rear wheelarches where they have become three-dimensional objects in their own right, rather like they were on the Rossa prototype, but more extreme.
“Something that would have been possible at the beginning, but which we didn’t do, was to incorporate an air scoop on the roof. For starters, the car became too high and it seemed a bit of a caricature of a F1 car. In addition, it would have notably reduced visibility through the rear screen. An alternative we looked at in early sketches was to incorporate air intakes alongside the roof, but from some angles they looked really odd! Hence we returned to the classic side air intakes.
“I always say that designing a car means finding the best compromise between a series of constraints, even when one is designing an extreme performance car that will only be produced in a few hundred examples, like the FX.
“Hence certain styling choices are also technological solutions. For example, the FX’s wheels (18” front and 19” rear in forged aluminium) had to be as light as possible to reduce unsprung masses. A design with cuts in the spokes themselves was imposed as a technical constraint by the wheel manufacturer, because it’s the best way to make them lighter, rendering the casting process easier. In this way, there are two points where the mould can be injected for each spoke and this area can thus be reduced in section to make them very thin without compromising structural rigidity."
The future
We closed our fascinating in-depth discussion with Ing. Ramaciotti with the question of how he would envisage Ferrari’s next supercar from a designer’s standpoint.
“Well, we’ve only just finished working on this one! Obviously I would want it to be better and even more advanced than the FX! I believe that, in the past, Pininfarina has come up with some truly beautiful designs, such as the 456 GT the 550 Maranello and the 360 Modena. The F355 was also a fantastic car because. I hope that when we'll be talking about the next supercar, technology will provide us with problems to resolve that will lead to the creation of new styles and shapes.
"I refer especially to the ability of designers to work keeping in mind the performance goals they want to reach, and the technologies that will permit the attainment of those objectives. Having progressed, for example, from tubular steel chassis to carbon-fibre radically changed the way this kind of car is designed. I would like to think that something else of similar importance will come along and make us change how we design cars so that we can create even more unusual shapes.”
** reproduced without permission **
[This message has been edited by cojones (edited 13 June 2002).]
