The SF90 – named in reference to its debut in the 90th anniversary year of the creation of Enzo Ferrari’s ‘ex-works’ Alfa Romeo racing team in 1929 – is based on a monocoque chassis tub built just over the road from Ferrari’s Maranello factory, by the company’s wholly owned Scaglietti coachworks subsidiary.
The chassis is of an entirely new design. It uses hollow aluminium castings and consists of new lightweight aluminium alloys and a carbonfibre rear bulkhead. It’s 20% stiffer in bending and 40% more torsionally rigid than any comparable tub that the company has used before, but it’s no heavier.
The car’s powertrain consists of a redesigned and enlarged F154-family, mid-mounted, twin-turbocharged 770bhp V8 engine, three AC synchronous electric drive motors and a 7.9kWh lithium ion drive battery, along with some very sophisticated power-control electronics.
The biggest and most powerful of those motors, the ‘motor-generator unit, kinetic’ in Ferrari-speak, is a three-phase axial flux motor sandwiched between the car’s V8 engine and its eight-speed dual-clutch automatic gearbox. That it’s said to be derived from the matching component in Ferrari’s current Formula 1 car says all you need to know about the way in which technology can still transfer from race track to road, even from the very highest reaches of motorsport. It makes up to 201bhp all on its own, but there are two more drive motors (radial flux, rated for a combined 266bhp between them) mounted in the front of the car, which drive the front wheels through independent, per-motor transmissions and which form a fully asymmetrical torque-vectoring electric front axle.
