Test driving a new car should ideally involve a number of tests involving handling and performance ideally carried out on various roads in a variety of weather conditions. Testing a Ferrari in California usually means fore going any inclement weather testing. No so on my road test of the new Ferrari Portofino last week. I got to experience rain, flooded roads, bumpy roads, shitty roads, smooth roads, sunshine, overcast weather, and the thrill of the infamous 405 freeway in Los Angeles. The Ferrari Portofino is a vast improvement over its replacement the California, in terms of styling, performance, and handling. The California was a GT cruiser, the Portofino is a GT and a sportscar.

The Portofino is an all new replacement for the Ferrari California. Ferrari produced 11,000 California’s between 2008 and 2017. The Portofino has embraced an aggressive new styling which to my mind makes its one of the best looking Ferrari of recent times. Power for the Portofino comes from a V8 twin turbocharged engine that it shares with the Ferrari Lusso T, and produces 591 horsepower at 7.500 rpm. The Portofino retains the 7 speed dual clutch transmission from the California T with new software to allow for quicker upshifts. The list price for my test car was $268,608, which included $2,531 for carbon fibre cup holders.

I picked up my Grigio titanio metal Ferrari Portofino with cuoio interior and headed up Angeles Forest highway on our way to Palmdale to sample the handling and performance of this new Ferrari. I love driving amidst the stark arid desert landscape, where the emptiness of the terrain makes you feel intoxicatingly liberated from the urban sprawl. The Portofino is quite at home on these roads, though it is advisable to engage the bumpy road button to iron out some of the harsher elements of the great majority of California roads. Change the setting on the manettino (Italian for: little lever) from comfort to sport and you have changed the dynamic of this Ferrari from a GT cruiser to a rocket of a sportscar.

Driving along Angeles Forest Highway I could feel all the changes in the Portofino over the California. The Portofino feels faster, and the electronically assisted power steering feels quicker which facilitates better engagement with the car. Tackling the twisty roads of Angeles Forest allowed my wife to view on her passenger display screen the speed, revs and the G loading of our journey (a $5,906 option). This novel feature can be highly amusing or cause extreme anxiety to one’s passenger. Happily we made to Palmdale without any incident.

The party piece of the Portofino is without doubt the ability to convert from a hardtop coupe to an open top convertible. I pulled over highway along Angeles Forest highway to put the top down and enjoy the fresh desert air. Ferrari first introduced this hard top convertible on the California in 2008. For me the hardtop is aesthetically more pleasing than a canvas roof found on other manufacturer’s convertibles. The argument over it being too heavy is poppycock, the Portofino actually weighs 80kg less than the California. The hard top provides better visibility and a less claustrophobic cockpit in my humble opinion. Just watching the mechanics of the conversion process is a sight to behold.

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The cities of Palmdale and Lancaster make up the region known as Antelope valley that is home to a number of aviation related industries such as U.S. Air Force Plant 42 home to Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing and NASA. Edwards Air force Base is renowned for feats of aviation, among them being the Bell X1 piloted by Chuck Yeager that broke the sound barrier in 1947. No less important is the Mojave Air and Space Pot home of the civilian test pilots school, as well as a boneyard for commercial airliners. If you had not gathered already I am a huge aviation enthusiast and I love combining my passion for aviation and supercars whenever possible.

California weather is normally quite balmy, however for this latest adventure we managed to get a rather more rounded weather experience with heavy rain, lightening and even some flooding to make this a true test for the Ferrari Portofino. As we headed out to the Mojave Air and Space Port the heavens opened up and I got to use the windscreen wipers on a Ferrari for the first time. Ferrari have conveniently changed the wiper function from a small paddle to a rocker dial on the steering wheel. The old version was a bit hit and miss when trying to get the right setting, whereas the new version is an easy toggle between modes. When visiting a Space Port its appropriate to visit in a Ferrari. We had lunch at the Voyager restaurant which was filled with aviation lore, and even better for an aviation geek like myself was the opportunity to go outside to a viewing platform and take pictures of the many aircraft located at Mojave. The largest concentration of aircraft are former airliners that have been decommissioned and are awaiting scrapping and recycling.

After Mojave it was off to El Mirage dry lake bed, where the plan was to take the Ferrari out onto the lake bed for a photoshoot. The journey to El Mirage was quite the test for the Portofino. The roads to El Mirage varied from bumpy, to very bumpy to just plain awful. I switched driving modes from sport to comfort and engaged the bumpy road button and the Portofino handled the conditions without any problems (thanks to the Portofino’s magnetorheological dampers). At several places we came across sections of the road that had been flooded. I was a bit concerned about taking the Ferrari across the flood waters. Thankfully the Portofino is not a low slug supercar that requires you to raise the noise to get into slightly angled driveways, so going through a bit of water was actually very simple. One upside to the grigio titanio metal colour scheme was the ability to hide the dirtiness of the Portofino in my photographs. This came in handy when I posed the Portofino for some pictures on Rodeo drive.

Long straight back roads provided ample opportunity to demonstrate the overtaking capabilities of the Portofino. This was the major feature of the new Ferrari that truly surprised me. A car that has 591 hp and a top speed of 199 mph is by definition fast, but it’s how it achieves that speed that is remarkable. It was effortless even in comfort mode to overtake traffic. The performance reminded me of the Portofino’s older supercar sibling the 488. Not that I advocate driving at this speed but the Portofino could easily cruise at 100mph with plenty to spare. After all this we arrived at El Mirage only to find that access to the lakebed was denied to due flooding. Still we were all alone and got some great images with some of the local Joshua trees. A surprise aerial visitor was a General Atomics Grey Eagle drone on a test flight, I had never seen a military drone before.

No Los Angeles Ferrari experience is complete without a visit to Rodeo drive. Thanks to my wife we got to take a new road on our way to Rodeo drive. I heartily recommend driving Benedict Canyon, which has some splendid views of Los Angeles. We cruised at a steady 30 mph through the canyon and the endless multi-million dollar mansions. Driving down Rodeo one is struck by the fact that most of the people walking about seem to be tourists rather than locals. At the end of Rodeo drive is the Beverly Wilshire Hotel who kindly allowed me to pull into their drop off area to take some photographs. The Portofino looked right at home and even better the grigio titanio metal helped obscure the acquired road debris from El Mirage.

I came away with enormous respect for the Portofino, a car that is much more aggressive than its predecessor the California. The Portofino has a sharp edge to its performance and I find the styling to be most arresting. Like the California you can use this Ferrari as your daily driver, with the added bonus of having the option to transform from a handsome coupe to a dashing convertible at the press of a button. The California was at its heart a GT touring machine, the Portofino can certainly be a cruiser, but at its heart the Portofino is undeniably a super-fast sportscar.