The Ferrari 458 will go down in history as one of the all-time greats off GT category racing. While it’s now past its sell by date, the car is still racking up wins in lower class GT racing. For 2016, Ferrari has brought an all new GT car based on the all-new Ferrari 488 road car.
The new 488 will come as the same package as the new BMW M6, in forms of GT LM and GT3 cars etc, with only small changes needed to compete in either class. We were first able to see the new 488 in action at the Daytona 24h in February, whereby the car scored a 4th place finish in the GT LM class.
While the 458 was a great overall car, it's seemed to suffer from issues with straight-line speed and downforce levels, while the car worked on the faster circuits, this was an area where AF Corse and Ferrari wanted to fix with its next generation GT car.
Engine
The biggest change here is the switch from a normally aspirated engine to a 3.9 V8 with twin turbochargers, making it one of a handful of cars with a turbo in either GT3 or GT LM class. The birth of the engine created headaches for engineers who found the engine overweight and underpowered at first. In IMSA testing at Daytona, Ferrari engineers worked out that the BMW M6 had around 100BHP more than their engine, thus making the Ferrari one of the slower GT cars around track.
Ferrari had to work very hard to save weight in its engine, which results in a new engine block, valves, and crankshaft. They have also switched to a lighter battery which is a Lithium one, which has saved over thirty pounds in the engine bay.