Forced to choose between a coupe or convertible, I’m picking the option with the wind in my hair and uninhibited exhaust notes filling my ears like surround sound every time. The natural weight and rigidity compromises of today’s convertibles rarely make enough of a difference for me to care on the road. Which leads me to the Ferrari Amalfi Spider.
I drove the Amalfi coupe last year, and what a splendid evolution of the Roma it was. Yes, there was stigma to driving the entry-level Ferrari in the awkward California years, that car having originally been designed as a Maserati. But it’s gone now, and the Amalfi Spider is, on paper, the version of the front-engined V-8 two-door I would typically like the most.
Visually, the Amalfi Spider gets off to a sterling start with its roof folded away. It’s even easier on the eyes than the handsome coupe, my test car in Greece inviting me in with the apt, sunset-inspired Rosso Tramonto paint and its glistening Tecnico Ottanio weave softtop. Ferrari designers tell me they used a “speedform” design model when they started drawing the Amalfi refresh of the Roma, with the goal of creating a shape inspired by speed itself. Form your own opinion, but I find the restraint in the styling more appealing than the more radical design of some other recent Ferraris.
View Price on AmazonOn some of southern Greece’s bumpy beachside roads I tried my best to find any sense that the softtop lacked rigidity but quickly realized it wasn’t there. The retractable fabric roof is the same one introduced with the Roma Spider, a five-layer piece made with acoustic-deadening fabric. This works—with the roof raised I genuinely forgot during certain points of my drive that I was piloting a convertible, which is about the greatest compliment anyone can pay a softtop roadster.
Considering the 105-degree Fahrenheit temperatures up in Greece’s canyon roads, I kept my roofless sprints short. The 13.5 seconds it takes for the top to go down electrically is simple work, and deploying the wind deflector is just as easy from the driver’s seat with a switch that makes the odd partition between the two rear seats swing up. With this in place and the windows up, the cabin had such little buffeting that I was almost disappointed at how insulated from the environment I was. But pop the windows down and the Amalfi Spider’s brutal pace through a technical road will ensure your hair is entirely out of place by the next stop.
The Amalfi Spider’s powertrain is identical to that in the coupe, representing respectable upgrades over the 2024 Roma Spider. The 3.9-liter twin-turbo V-8 shoved way back in the engine bay is good for 631 horsepower at 7500 rpm and 561 lb-ft of torque at 3000 rpm, all of that sent through an eight-speed transaxle, electronically-controlled limited-slip differential, and onward to the back axle. Ferrari finds the extra poke over the Roma by way of a more advanced turbo management system pioneered in other cars like the 296 GTB, this allowing greater independent control of each turbo.
But sound was disappointing, my test car exhaling through mufflers engineered for Europe’s noise emission regulations. Sad to report, it was so quiet with the top down that very little Ferrari howl made its way into the cabin. There was just lots of rushing air, and when I was lucky enough to have a rock wall nearby for the exhaust to reverb off of, I only got a faint tinkling of the noise it was trying to make, not the roofless Ferrari song I was hoping for.
Then when I put the top back up, I realized the car sounds far better. The bugle of an intake roar is sonorous in the cabin. It even sounds like there’s more exhaust noise when I go top on, windows down, which may be the best way to drive the Amalfi Spider short of finding an aftermarket exhaust to fit. For the first time in a long time, I’m finding myself trending toward the coupe over the convertible.
Source: roadandtrack.com
