Ferrari 296 GTB review

Ferrari is clearly confident in its product. It has every right to be. Look through the back catalogue of this car’s predecessors and they’re still worth big money. Used F8s are over £200k, 488s between £150-170k, 458s around the £130-140k mark at over ten years old. Those pre-turbo era cars may well be the ones we look back on most fondly, that will prove to be the best investments.

The V6 is a risk for Ferrari, albeit one it had to make. Hybrid V8 is for the SF90, this needed to be different. But the V6 turbo is, we reckon, a better engine than the V8, fizzier and more fiery, a real star of the show. Hard sell in the showroom to persuade someone that a car with two fewer cylinders retails for £40,000 more than the V8 F8 Tributo, but not once they’ve been exposed to it.

£241,500 is, as ever with Ferrari, just the starting point though. Most will be over £300,000 when they leave Maranello, wearing extra carbon inside and out, painted special colours and perhaps fitted with the £25,920 Assetto Fiorano pack (over £2,000 per kilo saved…). We can gasp at the cost all we like, but money doesn’t matter to people buying a new 296 GTB – it just means less people can afford one, and that’s the whole point.