Why The Ferrari 599 GTB Fiorano is The Car Market's Best Kept Secret

[Music] hello everybody those who've been watching the channel for a while will know that i am strongly opposed to the idea of a car as a purely financial investment but that doesn't mean that i'm willing to lose lots of money on any car that i buy in fact whenever i go looking for something new i'm always on the hump for a car that appears to be a relative bargain something that i'll be able to get into do some miles in and then get out of without too much of a penalty and the car we're looking at today is an excellent example of one of those this is the ferrari 599 or to give it its full title the 599 gtb fiorano it is a two-seater super gt that'll do 205 mile an hour thanks to its enzo derived v12 engine it will eat an aston martin v12 vantage for breakfast and yet you can pick one of these up for less than the price of a modestly optioned bmw m3 or a 911 carrera so today i'm asking why that is the looks are certainly one reason why i've never really given the 599 much of a second thought i know ferrari have a reputation for making some of the world's most beautiful cars and indeed from the 308 up to the current 812 they have made some absolutely stunning pieces of automotive art however they've also got quite a few misses in their back catalogue as well things from the 612 scaglietti which to my eyes just looks a little bit bulbous and strange back to the old mondial which is an odd duck if i'm being polite however with the 599 it's not a total disaster and indeed from the front three quarters angle i think is actually a rather handsome thing this nose drops off to almost nothing at the front it's quite sculpted you've got very sexy purposeful looking vents from the side i actually quite like it too and the overall profile is very similar to that of the f12 a car that i really do like the looks of however it's the rear of the 599 that really falls apart for me first off you've now got a single tail light rather than the classic ferrari twin and i've always preferred the look of the twin tower lights the boot is very high compared to say the 550 and the overall effect is of a rear end that feels rather bulbous and just a little bit bigger than it has to be these flying buttresses also never really work for me although they do work for the car and they help contribute real actual downfalls which is one of the reasons they were allowed to stay because they were originally put on the car as simply a styling exercise and ferrari's boss luca de montezema was never going to allow his cars to have anything on them that wasn't also functional size is another off-sited concern with the 599 and indeed when you're standing with it and have nothing to compare to it does feel and look like a pretty large car but it's actually not certainly when you compare it with some of the other stuff that's on the road today which is in theory a small car compared to the 550 or 575 that came before it's about an inch wider two and a half inches taller and four inches longer but in spite of that it now has a wheelbase 10 inches longer in order to give it a bit more stability and to help with the packaging that i think really does give you the impression that it is a significantly bigger car i'd always said that the 599 was massive compared to the 550 yet when i reviewed one a couple of years ago and i parked the two side by side they weren't actually that dramatically different the 599 just feels like it's a bigger car and by volume probably is but in terms of footprint the difference isn't what you think and then we come to that old ferrari bashing favorite reliability and running costs i'm never going to pretend that running one of these is going to be something you can do on the cheap it's simply never going to happen however i do believe that if you look at the total cost of ownership they might not actually be quite as severe as you might first imagine to give you an example that bmw m3 i mentioned earlier if you are going to buy one of those with a reasonable specification from a bmw dealer the current finance packages being offered by them would mean that over a four-year period you would have paid around 54 000 pounds to own that car but at the end of that you're probably not going to be getting much back whereas a 599 can be had on a very similar deal however when all is said and done the car is probably worth relatively close to the price you paid for it in the first place and i know what you're thinking the idea that a brand new bmw will depreciate more than a 14 year old ferrari is hardly a revolutionary one and certainly the overall running cost of this will be higher fuel economy is not very good expect teens as a starting point but then if you bought an amg e63 s you probably wouldn't do that much better in one of those and parts are a bit of a mixed bag rear springs for example on one of these are 50 pounds discs are certainly expensive at just over two and a half thousand pounds but then on a bmw m3 with ceramics they can be over 4000 pounds so it's not quite as clear-cut as you would imagine on that front either without a shadow of a doubt the single least desirable feature of these cars is the gearbox because the vast majority of 599s came with ferrari's f1 semi-automatic single clutch automated manual box even when new it was something that wasn't particularly well loved and today a decade and a half on it's still misunderstood by an awful lot of people the fact is if you know how to drive with one of these things they're actually not that bad ordinarily and if we were talking about say a bmw m3 i would say that trying to adapt your driving style to suit the car is just not acceptable but i think if you're going to go out in the ferrari you are prepared to be more involved in the driving experience and so for cars like this i'm willing to give the system a bit more of a pass and the fact is that actually works quite well here the internet is full of horror stories about f1 pumps failing and the cost of clutches and how long they'll last and the truth is well cared for you can get more than 50 000 miles out of one of these clutches even my scuderia which granted is another step on in terms of technology has only worn about a third of its clutch in around 25 000 miles so there's absolutely no reason to worry if a car only had a clutch about 10 000 miles ago even better if you have your car inspected by a ferrari dealer before you buy and you really should do that they can also give you an estimated reading of how much life the clutch has left in it so you won't get any nasty surprises even the f1 pumps which were a known point of failure in some earlier cars can actually be rebuilt by third-party companies rather than being replaced and if you're still concerned about the car's longevity if you do buy from a ferrari main dealer they will warrant these cars up to 15 years old and although that won't cover everything by that age the big mechanical components engine and gearbox are covered meaning you should be able to sleep pretty soundly at night now this particular car actually came from roy humphrey prestige cars if you've ever been up the a140 you've probably seen their showroom and i have to say i am very jealous of this car because once you get past those few negatives you find an awful lot to like beneath this sharply sculpted bonnet and nestled just behind the axle line you'll find a ferrari f-140c six litres of italian goodness and even amongst exotic cars there is certainly a reverence when it comes to the ferrari v12 if they know how to do nothing else they know how to put one of these together the main difference between this engine and the one in the enzo is in terms of the intake setup because this has to go at the front of the car it cannot be quite as tall as the lump in the mid-engined enzo even still it puts out 620 metric horsepower 448 pound foot of torque that's just over 600 newton meters and that's enough to get this car from naught to 62 in 3.7 seconds and well over 200 mile an hour in a straight line this can keep up with a 458 and that i think is good enough just to put that into some kind of context this has more than 100 horsepower over the outgoing 575 but it wasn't just in the engine department where ferrari focused their attention because the chassis of the 599 is also all new for the 550 and 575 ferrari used their traditional method of a steel tubular chassis clothed in aluminium body work but for the 599 ferrari switched to the method they were also using for the 360 which is an all-aluminium construction because of that despite the size increase this is actually a marginally lighter car than even a manual box equipped 550. it is only about 50 kilos heavier than an aston martin v12 vantage s despite being considerably larger if you compare this with an aston martin db9 which is also a v12 engined grand tourer this is actually a hundred kilos lighter in fact it's still 40 kilos lighter than the carbon fiber bodied aston martin vanquish ii however that's all stuff that you can't really see and one of my favorite bits of this car is that you can this has to be one of my favorite interiors in just about any car ever you could look at it as a sort of awkward halfway house between old and new but instead i see this really as sort of the best of both because you still have this very old-fashioned ferrari feel you've got acres of leather but you've also got some new more modern touches coming through so there is a lot of carbon fiber in fact the options on this car are pretty generous so you've got these big carbon door pieces and although you could get a carbon interior in the 550 and that car it just feels a bit wrong whereas this really suits him the steering wheel again you've got the manatino and the engine start button but you haven't got all the other controls yet you've still got traditional stocks here which mean if you are using multiple cars this is just a little bit easier to get in and out of because other more modern ferraris do require a period of readjustment after driving anything else in fact even down here is all leather too these sills are carbon fiber these are the standard seats in a 599 and they have to be some of the best seats in any car i've ever driven in terms of the compromise between support and comfort there is little better out there they've got portions of carbon on them though the standard seats aren't fully carbon these are also the daytona ones so they've got these little distinctive stripes with the holes punched into them you've got heating not ventilation on this but they are absolutely magnificent i've already done about four or five hundred miles in this car in only a few days because we've been traveling about in it and it's a wonderful place to spend some time you've got a few concessions to the modern world so up here you do have one digital display but that's it it means that you've got all the information that you need but it's not very distracting and it's sat next to a pair of rather nice looking analog dials even the radio over here if you don't want to see it is tucked away neatly behind a little sliver of carbon too and the hvac controls are actually much easier to look at and use than those in the 812 which to be honest with you are really rather frustrating and the best news is that with these seats and the slightly higher roof line compared to the older cars there is actually just a little bit more room in this cabin than there was before now it's still not particularly generous so if you're over six foot i do say exercise some caution but if you just about couldn't fit in a 575 you probably just about can fit in one of these and that's only ever a very good thing you've still got a reasonable amount of storage space the boot's actually fairly generous for this type of car compared with the equivalent aston it's pretty good and you've got space behind you for luggage too in this car that's also leather covered and that was a fairly expensive option when new the 599 was in production from 2006 until 2012. by this time ferrari had stopped giving out official production numbers for each model instead leaving everybody to use their best gifts and for this car the internet seems to estimate there are maybe about 4 000 in the world that number would be a lot higher if it weren't for the fact that right in the middle of the 599 production run you had the global financial crisis so many cars like this didn't really do that well bear in mind that in 2010 this car had a list price of 207 000 pounds and that's before options this is actually a source of good news because the car's relative failure to sell when new translates into rarity later and rarity only ever pushes values up the options list on the 599 was also a very different affair to your modern ferraris which to be honest have options lists that read like lord of the rings with this it was much simpler in fact you could fit the entire options list on one piece of paper the standard specification of uk 599s was also fairly generous they all came with the f1 gearbox as standard i am told a handful of manual cars were actually delivered new to the uk but bear in mind global production of manual 599s is estimated at around 30 cars so not only are they extremely rare as you might imagine they're also now incredibly expensive beyond that though with a standard uk car and watch out because there are some imports about you got carbon ceramic brakes you also got parking sensors and the leather headliner the rest of the options list consisted of almost purely cosmetic items there wasn't really any sort of performance enhancement initially available with the 599 so you get things like the 20-inch challenge wheels and to be honest i have never ever seen a 599 lens original wheels in fact i'm not sure they ever sold one you've got the daytona stripes for the seats obviously the different leathers inside the extra leather little extra bit of carbon and all that sort of stuff a couple of years into production ferrari introduced the 599 hgte that's the handling gran turismo evolution that was a pack much like the older 575 and 550 fiorano handling packs aimed at the sportier driver who wanted a more raw focused experience so you got stiffer lower springs you've got thicker anti-roll bars a fruitier exhaust and a remap for the gearbox to make shift times even quicker however people didn't really seem to think that it added an awful lot to the car and instead took away a little bit of its all-round usability and just took the edge off the cars ride and for that reason i would say this isn't really something i'd consider an essential if you did want it you could buy a car new with it and you could also have it retrofitted to your car if it was bought without and depending on the age of your car you may or may not be able to get all of the elements you were never going to get the cosmetic upgrades if you did it later and if you had an early car you couldn't get the gearbox software upgrades either because you didn't have the supporting hardware that was never as you might imagine a cheap thing to do and ferrari at the time quoted around 20 000 pounds to fit it i honestly wouldn't really worry about it because if i was buying a car like this i want it to be more of a gt if i want to buy a sports car you should just go and buy a 430. so then the million dollar question exactly how much are you going to pay to get into a 599 well if you look at a ferrari dealer none of them seem to have much stock at the minute but there are a few 599s out there in the official approved used network however they tend to be later lower mile examples often with the hgte pack fitted and for those ferrari dealers seem to want a fairly significant premium they're asking between 120 and 130 000 pounds for some cars to me that's just too much that's too close for comfort to an f12 which you can get for about 150 to 160 if you're careful and i think that is well worth paying the extra for however if you're happy to buy from an independent yet still reputable dealer like roy humphrey or anywhere else you can get one of these for significantly less you could find a car like this with reasonable mileage 40 000 so enough that it's depreciated and you're not going to do too much more of that but not so many that things falling apart and you could happily pay between 80 and 90 grand for a car in good condition with a good specification when a current 911 with a few options is a hundred grand an m3 with a few options is 93 grand i think these are not cheap but they are quite good value for money the last time i drove one of these it's fair to say that i really liked it but i don't think i loved it the car did have a few issues but a few miles in this and i have fallen head over heels for the 599 but there are a couple of differences between this car and the last one i drove that are worth talking about and to best explain those we should head out onto the road [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] uh [Music] [Applause] as you can probably tell today is not the ideal conditions to be testing a 600 plus horsepower rear-wheel drive v12 ferrari with pirelli p-zeros that are definitely past their sell by date however i didn't want to do this video and not take the car out for a drive as i mentioned there are some key differences between this and the car i drove last that was an imported emirates spec car so it did have some subtle differences it had steel brakes rather than the ceramics the interior had been worn down by a few too many years in the jordanian sunshine and it was left hand drive this being right hand drive my first impression was that the 599 while still a big car isn't quite as unmanageable as i thought and aston martin is certainly a more diminutive thing but with those you have absolutely no appreciation of where the front of the car is with this you can see a lot more bonnet and that gives you at least half a chance of being able to place the car where you want it the 599 has a reputation for being extraordinarily spiky and on these tyres you can see where it gets it from this thing has absolutely ludicrous reserves of torque from almost nothing in fact i'm not sure i've yet really had full throttle in this car for more than a few seconds it really is rather potent and if you want to try and get everything out of it on a day like today that's probably not going to end too well this car is also not entirely standard it's had a few modifications from its owners over the years the biggest and most notable are the fitment of a novitec exhaust and an ecu so that brings not just some extra much welcome noise but also a bit more power too they estimate around another 30 horses and this certainly feels like a very healthy car the last one didn't exactly feel shy on power but this is absolutely ludicrous it's very rare that you get a car which feels properly fast in the driver's seat this does it's incredible and just so flexible you can absolutely never catch it off guard even more surprisingly if you can get the car above 5000 rpm with a fair bit of throttle application you'll actually get some reasonably quick shifts out of it too the f1 box is still far from perfect the dual clutch is technically a lot better however if you're willing to work with it and help it out at lower speeds and lower amount of throttle it can actually be pretty smooth when you need it to as well the exhaust on the regular car is just too quiet for my liking and being a ferrari there are a lot of options for aftermarket systems this one has the plain novitek back box nothing else no decats no sports cats no x-pipes nothing what you get is this really nice classic ferrari v12 sound it's not the howl you get from say a 509 gto or an f12 if you want your car to sound like that you need to get a system from you i happen to know the uk distributor so if that is something you're interested in do drop me a line i'll be happy to put you in touch what makes those later cars sound so different despite having a similar engine is the manifolds so these run as four three cylinder engines something lamborghini do and for many reasons it's actually quite a good idea however with the fiamengi system the gto the f12 and the 812 they run a six into one manifold so all six pipes from one side of the engine all meet at the same time with equal length tubing and that gives you that real high pitched formula one sound when my friend got in touch and said he was looking for a 599 i found this one when it said it had an overtake exhaust on it i was a little bit worried because you can get some systems that are just obscenely loud you just wouldn't want to live with them this system is switchable although frustratingly if you put it in sport race or cst off it's just open valves all the time luckily it's not actually that bad doesn't really boom either and it's very tolerable for long distances this is the system these cars should have had from the off it tells you a lot about the build quality of the 5992 that from in here the system still doesn't sound that raucous but trust me when you're outside and this thing drives by you can hear it the other modification made to this car has been the fitment of some lowering springs they are apparently equivalent to the ferrari hgte items but they aren't genuine ferrari items i don't know if anything's being done to reprogram the dampers at the same time because when ferrari do these things not only do they fit their springs but they also fit new software for the dampers they may make the car look a little bit better because it sits lower but overall i'm not a fan of these springs a regular car is damned just about spot on and so for that reason i would keep the originals on something like this it's so lively this thing to be honest anything with this amount of power in these conditions on these tyres they're not really going to do that much better i'm slowly building some confidence in the traction control system this has ferrari's first generation of f1 track this doesn't have the e-diff that the 430 did but then that didn't have the f1 track traction control it was the scuderia that first married the two together and i was also the first car to get the bumpy road mode switch and the last car i drove i felt like the steering was good but not great here it's absolutely excellent there are a number of different reasons why that might be but the most likely is that this car is just in slightly better condition than the previous one i drove unfortunately when you do test used cars you could only ever really give an opinion of the exact model that you're driving a lot of people do complain in my comment section and say why did i drive a modified example or an old example or one that wasn't box fresh and the fact is that maybe that car's got problems unique to it maybe it doesn't but i just cannot drive two cars every time i do a review you know one control car that's a known quantity and then the car that i've been up for review it's just impractical now i think we've got a little bit of space here so let me show you how quickly this car can change gear if it's in the mood so get in a straight line because i may need some room we'll let this car go past if it's like the scuderia to get the fast change you need more than 5000 rpm and more than 40 throttle here we go see as quick it was also changing gear while it was going sideways this thing is so hairy so so leery but to be fair i am getting used to it and i am building confidence in it and yeah these are just not the conditions five degrees out there there is still ice now all around so i am being overly cautious so the steering in this car absolutely beautifully weighted really direct it's vastly superior and i i really mean that compared to an f12 and certainly an 812 those are really quite lackluster i don't know why it is that ferrari have such a trouble getting steering consistently right some of their cars brilliant the 550 the f8 scuderia but then so many others it's just poor a weakness of their cars and when you've got something like an 812 which has 800 horsepower in it you do not want vague steering this no such issues it's some of the nicest steering in any car like this you're ever likely to experience so there we have it i will be revisiting this car at some point in the near future so if you want to know anything more about it please do drop me a comment down below and i'll see if we can address it in the next video the 599 may not be a perfect car but then i'm not sure the perfect car actually exists and if it does it almost certainly doesn't have a ferrari badge on it it is though an absolutely magnificent car a truly special experience a proper ferrari criminally underrated really honestly this car is a lot better than people make out and i think if you buy sensibly you should be able to run and own one of these and not lose too much of your initial investment like i said before i don't believe in cars as financial investments i definitely don't believe in old ferraris as financial investments however however if someone came to me now and said i got a hundred thousand pounds and i want to spend it on something fun but i don't want to take too many risks what should i buy i'd say 911 gt3 if you are willing to take a risk though try one of these it's superb that's enough from me for now i think please like comment down below subscribe if you haven't already and i'll see you for the next one bye [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: JayEmm on Cars

Views: 194,114

Keywords: Diary, VLOG, Car, Sound, Test, video, Review, Comparison, JayEmm on Cars, Ferrari 550, 599 Fiorano

Id: IhmD3_p5m0U

Length: 28min 5sec (1685 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 29 2022