Ferrari F40 Manual

[Nicodemo Aidara]

Itwasn't too long ago that Ferrari were considered the premier brand for the deep pocketed driving fanatic rather than the teched out lifestyle oriented droids that spill onto 2023 dealership floors. The favored transmission for all performance cars pre modernity was a manual gearbox of sorts, which in Ferrari cladding always came sheltered among shiny gates in the form of a seriously well-weighted metal ball attached to a bootless aluminum stick.

The last of Ferrari's modern mid-engined naturally aspirated V8's came in the form of the 458 Italia, though the last of those equipped with a manual stopped at the buck of the F430. Unavailable in the more potent Scuderia variant, the gated six speed came borrowed out of the 360 Modena as Ferrari's development team began the push to switch to automated manuals, giving little thought to the three pedaled adornment in the F430.

Gran Turismo Berlinetta more commonly referred to as 'GTB', is Ferrari's embellishment for its jack of all trades models. In order to properly send off the manual in both of Ferrari's at the time weight classes, the 599 GTB was the last of the V12's to offer production equivalents to offer a stick shift which in this case was an uprated version of the 550 Maranello's box designed to take on the grunt of a more virile near 600 hp engine.

Though, like the F430, Ferrari's end of times perspective on the departing manual meant that the Italian outfit whacked the transmission in as a base apritif while the interior cabin's focus lent itself to flappy paddle orientations.

The 456M GT was a colliding of times, slowly edging away from the sharper lines of the 80s for a softer disposition. Still, it came with pop-up headlights and trailing diagonal creases that bridged the past concepts with a new direction.

While the F1 alternative gearbox was lacking in either the 456 GT or GTA variants, the grand tourer did have an automatic transmission that debuted in the 400i. Armed with the practicality of a 2+2 and the excitement of a majestic self shifted V12, this subtle 90s supercar is an utter gem.

With a quaint design still rocking a rounder developed version of the F355's shelved rear, the shark nosed 360 Modena fared well as a poster car competitor to Lamborghini's rivaling box-shaped Gallardo.

The 550 Maranello must've been a special thing in Ferrari's stables, considering it was suffixed with the birthplace of Ferrari's primary production house. Think everything you've learned about the 360 except the engines been moved a few feet north and gained a couple more cylinders.

The 550 Maranello's holistic design was headed through Pininfarina - a coach building phenom to thank for an exceptionally long sculpted hood that somehow achieved a marked aggression amidst flowing panels and cascading buttresses. It's an adulting car for those who drink cognac with an extended pinky and expect their ride to be as smooth as their drink - yet no less exciting.

Forget every V12 Ferrari has ever made and feast your eyes on the GTO. Perhaps the most sought after of the front-engined V12s, the GTO was an amalgamation of grand touring looks hacked up to look as aggressive as its engine and suspension were tuned to be.

Completely brutal to drive on the street, the GTO is the reincarnation of Ares as a car, waging war on every quiet village with a curvaceous swath of tarmac to a noise that can only be described as a few octaves higher than a Scud, which is already earbleeding to say the least. Just a handful of GTOs were produced with a manual, and those few obscurities are likely to fetch well into the seven figure mark.

Coach building as an artistic practicality began well before cars even existed, mostly running Roman renditions of Pimp My Ride on horse carriages. Still alive today, coach building is for the rarified customer who revels in the singularity of something like the 599 GTZ Zagato, which has as many production units as most people have fingers. The critical observers among you may be quick to point out, it's a rather dully designed obscurity yet for whatever reason, such is the palette of the ultra-rich, as far as we're concerned a regular 599 GTB is a prettier first draft than this touched up antique.

Often rejected from as a Ferrari from the upper ranks of the world's most elite car following, the revised California is the last production prancing horse fitted with a manual transmission. Available to customer only in a roofless spec, the front-engined Ferrari California is everything an entry level Ferrari should be.

Its design is wild enough to befit the prancing horse badge, and with its naturally aspirated front-engined V8 the fabled resonance the brand is known for sings its passion as near to 8000 rpm as it can get.

Though never offered from Maranello themselves, the F430 Scud is vastly considered as one of the purebred greats, shaving a 100 kg off the standard car, coddling the driver between fully carbon doors and three-point race harnesses. There's no artificially engineered noise piped through the cabin - not that it would matter anyway, with the raucous ferocity of its normally aspirated 4.3-liter V8 ripping through every sinue of the car's being.

Granted, the F1 gearbox does suit the character of the Scud's innate spine-shattering savagery, but there's something desirably uncouth about retrofitting a gated six speed to the most unruly steed just to add the extra layer of handling the beast yourself.

Really, the 550 Barchetta is a chop-top Maranello trying to be as cool as the arcade versions of the 360 Modena. Valued higher with a fancy Italian name for roadster modeled by Italy's most famous coach building design house - Pininfarina. If you're curious what one of these are like to drive, your best bet is to buy a regular 550 and do the chop top yourself, considering an original Barchetta is impossible to find with just under 500 units ever produced and a sky-high current value north of $400,000.

The Ferrari F430 represents an important milestone in Ferrari's history, as it was the last mid-engine car from the storied Italian supercar brand to offer a manual transmission from the factory. While most stick-shift F430s languish in climate-controlled garages gaining value, there's at least one out there being used as intended.

The AutoTopNL channel recently got the chance to drive an F430 equipped with a gated manual transmission on a slice of Germany's unrestricted Autobahn, where there is no speed limit. With 483 horsepower on tap from a 4.3-liter V8, there's no shortage of speed. The driver is able to reach an indicated 310 km/h (192 mph) before lifting for traffic. That's just a few mph off the car's official top speed of 196.

Even cooler than the numbers on the dash are the sounds coming from the engine bay and the center console. With a redline of 8,500 rpm, the flat-plane crank engine screams through each gear, and when it's time to shift to the next cog, we're treated to a satisfying click-clack as the driver moves the shifter lever.

New mid-engine Ferraris might be faster and more advanced than the F430, but we'd be hard-pressed to find something else in this segment that delivers the best combination of feedback, noise, and modernity. That's probably why prices for manual F430s have spiked in recent years. Our advice? If you have one, hold onto it. Because you won't find anything else like it.

I worked on lots of computers back then. People used Macs for graphics intensive work, video editing, and music production. All purposes for which the 1.44 MB floppies were too small. (Anyone remember Zip drives? Jazz drives?) The disks themselves broke frequently. I cannot tell you how many of the little sliders from floppies I have removed from drives over the years. Programs required up to 24 separate disks to install on your machine.*Everybody* on the Mac side and PC side wanted a better method of transporting data from one machine to another. I never heard anyone complain about the death of the floppy drive on Macs. The market of people trying to do productive things with a piece of technology is a tad different than the market of people buying a recreational device. Nintendo is about to release a little computer that looks like an original NES and is filled with a bunch of games with, by today's standards, terrible graphics and music. They're going to sell boat loads of them. And on Christmas day this year there will be millions of adults and children playing Punch Out and Double Dragon. Because even now there's something satisfying about punching King Hippo in the mouth and watching his pants drop.

@carrya1911 Oh yeah. Duck Hunt would have been fun, but the Zapper doesn't work on modern TVs. :( A hack to let you shoot the dog would have been the best mod in the history of time. You can play Tecmo Bowl and pretend Bo Jackson is driving a Kia.

Track times are largely irrelevant. Most of the cars will never see a track. Just like most dive-rated watches will never see water deeper than the family pool. Speaking of watches, mechanical watches are still a thing. People spend ridiculous amounts of money on them despite the fact that you can get relatively inexpensive quartz watches that will keep precise time for decades without needing any of the TLC that the mechanical watches require to stay in working order. People often discuss how little time these watches lose, but ultimately that is not the deciding factor. A good manual shift is certainly not going to be as fast around the track in most people's hands...but that's largely irrelevant as most people won't use the car that way. A good manual shift is a *lot* more fun on a good drive than any paddle shifter. Indeed, the very presence of a good manual can turn an ordinary drive into an enjoyable one. I don't care about lap times. It's the experience. Working through a nice gated manual shifter is an extremely pleasant and rewarding experience. This is why the classics will hold a decent level of value even when various bubbles burst and the massive amounts of money chasing cars stops. If we drew a Venn diagram of Ferrari customers and expensive mechanical watch owners, I'd dare say the Ferrari circle would exist almost entirely inside the watch circle. Manuals won't sell because they're old and outdated...to a group of people who are wearing watches that function on old and outdated principles. People who paid handsomely for that extra complication and inconvenience because of what it represents or what it says about them. I'd argue the manual's fate is more in the hands of the people who don't want to make them anymore (for whatever reason) moreso than the preferences of the market. The market's preferences are pretty malleable.

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