Ferrari has rebooted its V-8 sports car range, starting with a sheet that's as clean as it was when the 355 gave way to the 360 Modena. Sure, the Ferrari 458 Italia is still a mid-engine rear-drive all-aluminum design, but the engine, gearbox, chassis, suspension, electronic controls, aerodynamics, instrumentation, and ergonomics are all revised. The actual manettino switch itself may carry over from the 430 Scuderia, but little else does as the 458 rolls out, ready to serve as the basis for the next decade's worth of V-8 Ferrari sports cars.
Starting from the very basics, the wheelbase is stretched 1.9 inches for greater stability while the overall length grows by only 0.6 inch, meaning the overhangs are way smaller, which reduces the polar moment of inertia, making the car more eager to rotate. New aluminum alloys cribbed from the aeronautics industry required Ferrari to employ novel bonding techniques, the overall result of which is a bodyshell structure improved by 20 percent in static torsion and 8 percent in static bending (dynamic stiffness increases by 16 and 7 percent, respectively). Even the body skin uses new materials that permit the roof, door outer panel, and front hood to be just 1 mm thick. The door inner panels are now die cast, and the door intrusion beams use an aluminum-lithium alloy that makes them 50 percent lighter than the F430's. The net result is a larger, stiffer bodyshell that weighs the same as the F430's.

Extensive wind-tunnel and computational fluid dynamics work yield a sleek-looking body with a slightly smaller frontal area (thanks to more compact architecture around the rear wheels) and a drag coefficient that drops from 0.34 to 0.33. More important, this new body's coefficient of downforce (0.36) is greater than its drag coefficient, for an overall aerodynamic efficiency of 1.09 (up from the F430's 0.90). And the front/rear downforce is balanced 41/59 percent front/rear, which nearly matches the weight distribution with a driver onboard so that the dynamic weight balance of the car never changes at high speeds. Downforce peaks at 794 pounds at top speed (202-plus mph).

Under the hood is a new direct-injected dry-sump V-8 engine optimized to spin to 9000 rpm (500 up from the F430, and the highest-revving street-legal V-8 production engine). Rated at 562 horsepower and 398 pound-feet of torque, it also sets records for specific power (125 horsepower/liter) and torque 89 pound-feet/liter) in a naturally aspirated engine. Smaller, lighter, lower-friction pistons with graphite-coated skirts help achieve the high revs. Further friction reductions come from a Diamond-Like Carbon coating on the valve tappets and superfinished camshafts.