Lambo vs Porsche vs Aston Martin vs 458 Italia

2010 Ferrari 458 Italia vs. Aston Martin V12 Vantage vs. Lamborghini Gallardo vs. Porsche 911 Turbo ShareShare RSSRSS PrintPrint Media Player

 

 

 

2011 Ferrari 458 Italia Picture

 

It's Italy vs. the rest of the world. | July 28, 2010 | Joel Peyru

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2010 Ferrari 458 Italia vs. Aston Martin V12 Vantage vs. Lamborghini Gallardo vs. Porsche 911 Turbo

Ferrari Takes on the Best of Britain, Germany and Italy

 

By Yves Bey-Rozet, Contributor | Published Jul 29, 2010

 

Poor So-So Pretty Good Good Excellent PoorSo-SoPretty GoodGoodExcellent14 Ratings 14 RatingsWho can get over the 2010 Ferrari 458 Italia? It makes all of us wild, and every one of us emerges from the car absolutely overcome, as if we'd just had a time-travel experience in a nuclear-powered Hot Wheels, some kind of amazing amalgam of sports car, child's toy and science gizmo.

 

Can the Ferrari 458 really be that much better than every other sports car on the planet? Is this really just a Ferrari sports car, or is it something else — something more like the Ferrari Enzo, an extreme experience of speed and style?

 

We've got some pretty reputable sports cars here just to help us come to grips with this question: the Aston Martin V12 Vantage, Lamborghini Gallardo LP570-4 Superleggera and Porsche 911 Turbo. By rights, this is the competitive set for the Ferrari 458 Italia, a group of cars that represents the same kind of performance profile.

 

And in measuring the Ferrari 458 Italia against these cars, will we discover that Ferrari has ratcheted up our expectations of what a street-legal sports car can achieve? Is this Ferrari a sports car or a supercar?

 

Can we ask more questions?

 

Aston Martin V12 Vantage

The Aston Martin V12 Vantage puts out 510 horsepower in a relatively calm fashion. To save you the math, that's 86 hp per liter, a fairly prodigious amount. Shame they didn't simply make the hood transparent so you could count the cylinders one by one with a trembling voice and a shaking hand. After all, you only really notice the engine's voice when you back off the throttle and hear the salute from the exhausts. When you do deploy the power, the countryside smudges beyond the windows and you really don't need 3-D glasses to feel like you're plunging into the view screen.

 

 

At the first corner you're well aware that the V12 engine is definitely in the front of this car, although the suspension has been firmed up by 45 percent compared to the V8 Vantage, including a lower ride height and massive antiroll bars. At 3,594 pounds, the V12 Vantage isn't that heavy, but it carries a lot more of it on the front tires than the V8 Vantage. The rear bar is particularly thick to unstick the rear tires and make the cornering balance livelier.

 

"Isn't she beautiful; she's really feminine," says a woman of not inconsiderable taste. We can see Aston-shape stars forming before her eyes. Certainly the Vantage is one of those cars you look forward to washing by hand. If this comparison were a measure of elegance, the Aston Martin would have walked away with the prize long before the others even found the podium.

 

In terms of pure performance, however, the Aston is well off the pace of the red devil from Italy. Beautifully balanced on the road, the V12 Vantage maintains a certain British reserve, even though it represents the largest engine in the smallest package among these cars. But then isn't an Aston Martin all about sipping your drink rather than knocking back a single shot?

 

Lamborghini Gallardo LP570-4 Superleggera

The most dramatic of our foursome has to be the Lamborghini Gallardo LP570-4 Superleggera. Our female Aston Martin enthusiast proclaims, "That's a car for Batman." Here you wonder that if you were to scribe the curves in the same way as you would with the Aston, you might actually cut yourself.

 

You floor the throttle and all the visual stealth is transformed into a good old-fashioned missile.

Much of the reason can be seen behind the rear window, a 5,204cc V10 that's capable of 552 hp. It revs to the sky and delivers dollops of power, something that can be achieved progressively in a high gear or violently in a lower one simply by dropping down two or three ratios with the shift paddles mounted on the steering column. It's at low and medium revs, however, that the new adoption of direct fuel injection is felt in the V10's stronger response.

 

The Graziano-built single-clutch automated manual transmission has improved software to make it more tractable at restrained speeds, but it never can quite match the friendly behavior of the Ferrari's Getrag-built dual-clutch automated manual. We'll just have to wait for the redesign of the Gallardo before we can expect a dual-clutch in this car or the Audi R8, as there's not enough packaging space right now.

 

One thing the Lamborghini has that the Ferrari does not is all-wheel drive, and the Superleggera's torque split of 30 percent front/70 percent rear ensures the car still has a lively, sporting feel. This is like having your mozzarella and eating it, too, as they say in Emilia Romagna. So although the Gallardo lacks the tiptoe deftness of the 458 Italia, it does deliver a much greater level of usability. After all, you might think twice about driving the Ferrari any great distance in a rainstorm.

 

Porsche 911 Turbo

The 2010 Porsche 911 Turbo has gone all Dopplekupplung on us. Although we say this in jest because Porsche was the first to experiment with a dual-clutch (dopplekuplung) transmission clear back in the 1980s with its Porsche 962 racing car. It's a reminder that the popularity of super sports cars these days has a lot to do with the newfound ability to drive them in everyday life that these automatic-style transmissions have brought us.

 

 

Of course, the shape of the Porsche 911 has been with us for decades and it's become part of the landscape. On the one hand this is reassuring proof of the rightness of the original design, but on the other you could begin to wonder whether Porsche is lacking in the originality department. It's also a bit disappointing that the new Turbo is a lot more discreet than the original 1976 Turbo. The rear wing is a little on the apologetic side and the car generally feels like much less of an event.

 

Some things don't change, however, such as when you floor the throttle and all the visual stealth is transformed into a good old-fashioned missile. The twin-turbo engine feels like a turbine, producing pure unending thrust right from the bottom of the tachometer. Add the PDK transmission (now available with optional shift paddles, which make the PDK seem like more of a manual transmission than the standard steering wheel buttons, which make it seem like an automatic), and you really wonder whether you're actually driving the world's fastest CVT-equipped car, since the slight squat in the back that you feel as you start to accelerate is maintained all the way up to 186 mph.

 

The feeling of omnipotence is further reinforced by the 911 Turbo's all-wheel-drive system, which makes weather conditions essentially irrelevant. This is the ultimate GT car, something you can take to the limit on the track and then drive to the ski slopes on holiday. The Porsche 911 Turbo might be the best attempt yet to persuade us that a gazillion-dollar sports car is not a frivolous trinket but instead an essential tool for life.

 

Ferrari 458 Italia

So, which bee exactly has stung the Cavallino for it to rear up with such energy this time around? Normally, Ferrari condescends to allow its rival in Sant'#### to lead the way in the horsepower stakes, but this time the Ferrari 458 Italia is right in the thick of the horsepower race, only 10 hp shy of the Gallardo LP-570-4 Superleggera.

 

The Italia's bodywork has movable aero whiskers at the front and there are lots of other small details like this that bear witness to the hours spent in the wind tunnel. Ferrari's midengine sports car really has morphed into something that is genuinely intriguing from a visual perspective, evidence of an inspired creative regeneration. It is a perfect blend of the functional and the beautiful, the aggressive and the elegant.

 

 

The acceleration is pure electricity, and the dual-clutch transmission ensures that there is no letup in the power delivery, much like the Porsche 911 Turbo. The difference here is that you get to savor every last decibel. Meanwhile, the chassis seems to anticipate your every wish, and there's no delay between your command and the response from the car. You think about where you want to go and the car simply responds, as if it is hard wired to your synapses. Bearing this in mind, you've got to stay on your toes if you want to stay out of trouble. The Italia is more than happy to let you cruise along a sunny coast, elbow resting on the window sill, but it will also instantly go down the rabbit hole and into an altogether different world if you're not careful.

 

Though initially the Ferrari strikes us as less hard-core than the LP570-4 Superleggera version of the Gallardo, the 458 Italia is still able to hold its own, and once the inevitable Scuderia version of the 458 appears, there will be no question of this Ferrari's ability to prevail against not only the Lamborghini but also the Porsche 911 GT2 and Porsche 911 GT3.

 

The reason the Ferrari 458 Italia can do this is the sheer range of electronic adjustability built into every mechanical aspect of the car: engine performance, throttle action, shifting speed, differential action, damping calibration and stability control. Thanks to these features, a pure-bred performance car can be driven daily as if it were a GT. The Ferrari 458 Italia is the world's most comfortable racing car.

 

Italy vs. the Rest of the World

The Aston Martin V12 Vantage pounds away. The Ferrari 458 Italia and Lamborghini Gallardo LP570-4 Superleggera use dynamite. The Porsche 911 Turbo is a hurricane. They all go about things in different ways, but one thing is for sure: They all smash pretty much everything else on the road to pieces.

 

The Ferrari 458 Italia is less discreet than the Porsche 911 Turbo, less spectacular than the Lamborghini Gallardo and less distinguished than the Aston Martin. It is less aurally explosive than the LP570-4 Superleggera and less musical than the V12 Vantage. It is less weather-friendly than the 911 Turbo and Gallardo. And yet the Ferrari 458 Italia trumps them all because sports-car performance is so intense. The 458 Italia is the car you want to use to wear out a racetrack, and that's the deciding factor.

 

This is a very exciting period in which to live, as the boundaries of automotive performance seem to be expanding every day.

 

Portions of this content have appeared in foreign print media and are reproduced with permission.

 

Sorry Aticle is from Edmunds

Ill take either the 911 Turbo or the Lp570 over the 458 anyday..

Gallardo LP570-4 Superleggera

Nissan GT-R MY10

Porsche 997 TurboS Pdk 530hp(with PVT)

Audi R8 V10

Lotus Evora

BMW M3 v8 manual

Continental Supersports

XKR 510hp

458italia and SLS amg (data are just a reprint of prev. comparo )

http://www.supercars.net/PitLane?viewThrea...&tID=180401

 

performances (gallardo - GTR - 997tt - R8 - Evora - M3 - Conti - XKR)

Top speed

324.850 - 310.38 - 320.00 - 309.34 - 250.32 - 263.00 - 326.67 - 280.00

Acc.

0-100 Kph

3.41 - 3.78 - 3.03 - 4.14 - 5.46 - 4.81 - 4.21 - 4.91

0-200 Kph

10.40 - 12.61 - 10.29 - 12.74 - 21.82 - 16.64 - 14.50 - 14.97

200-0

137.3 - 135.7 - 139.3 - 141.9 - 144.9 - 150.0 - 151.2 - 150.0

skipad

1.19 - 1.09 - 1.12 - 1.12 - 1.07 - 1.08 - 1.01 - 1.03

 

Laptimes

1.14.283 - 124.07 Kph - Lamborghini Gallardo LP570-4 Superleggera (Pzero Corsa) new lap record!

1.16:686 - 120.18 Kph - Nissan GT-R MY10 (Dunlop SP sport)

1.16:968 - 119.74 Kph - Porsche 997 TurboS 530hp pdk (Bridgestone Potenza)

1.17:141 - 119.47 Kph - Audi R8 V10 (Pirelli PZero)

1.21:096 - 113.64 Kph - BMW M3 manual (Pilot Sport)

1.21:444 - 113.16 Kph - Bentley Continental Supersports (Pirelli PZero)

1.21:733 - 112.76 Kph - Jaguar XKR 510hp (Dunlop SP Sport Maxx)

1.22:339 - 111.93 Kph - Lotus Evora 3.5l 280hp (Pirelli PZero)

 

 

 

 

Vairano Handling Course

 

LP 570-4 1:14.3

 

458 Italia 1:15.146