Here was a kerfuffle on twitter about Ferrari recently. Of course there was. There’s always a kerfuffle somewhere on the internet. I don’t know if Tim Berners-Lee’s main intention for the web was to permit a sallow virgin in Idaho to have an argument with a professor from the Sorbonne, but that’s what’s happened anyway. Twitter is a particularly good place for kerfuffles, from the big stuff like Russian chemical attacks and Donald Trump, to the small stuff like Jaffa Cakes and Donald Trump’s hands. I like to stay out of the way of the bumpier kerfuffles by hiding in a little corner with the car nerds, cowering in our safe space where people are happy to laugh at Sebastian Vettel’s new haircut and debate the merits of the Triumph Acclaim. But recently a kerfuffle came visiting even here, all over a crushed Ferrari.
You might have seen this story. In April 2017, a man had his 458 Spider seized by police for being uninsured and for showing up as a rebuilt write-off, having been involved in a severe smash and declared unfit to return to the road. A Category B insurance write-off can still be broken for parts, but the police, in one of those heavyhanded ‘make an example of you’ moves to which they’re prone, decided the entire thing should be destroyed. This happened last year, but it wasn’t until this March that a video of the Spider being brutally HIABed off a lorry was released online, and that’s when the kerfuffle kicked up. Twitter became ablaze with car people wailing and howling about the senseless waste of this Ferrari, and frankly I’ve never read such a load of hand-wringing, ill-considered twaddle.
We’re car people, so of course we don’t like seeing a very nice, very accomplished and very desirable car being mangled by hydraulic claws. But also because we’re car people, we should understand some of the basics. First of all, the car was written off by the insurance company and categorised as never to return to the road. So it’s no wonder the cops yanked it, notwithstanding that it also wasn’t insured. This is a car that’s been so badly banged up that an insurance assessor has deemed it too expensive to mend and too iffy to be made roadworthy again. The latter point also explains why the police couldn’t get cash back for taxpayers by auctioning it, and anyone suggesting such a thing wasn’t thinking hard enough.
Other people took to Twitter to point out that Cat B means a car can be parted out and that this should have happened to the seized 458, their point being that if the car had to die then at least another should be able to live on and that it was a ‘waste’ not to use its guts for good. But if you’re a 458 Spider owner and your car gets pranged, how would you like it repaired? With brand new parts, or with second-hand bits off a dodgy Spider that’s already been heavily spannered and then unlawfully put back together?
“But if you’re a 458 Spider owner and your car gets pranged, how would you like it repaired? With brand new parts, or with second-hand bits”
Amidst the kerfuffle it was also suggested that the seized 458 should at least donate its engine to something more interesting, but this is not 1974, and engine swaps are not straightforward. Modern cars are so beholden to multiplexing and multiple ECUs that forcing the engine of anything, never mind a high-born V8, to work in harmony with the drivetrain and electronics is a job that could drive even the finest auto electrician to bite into an HT lead. Can you imagine the hellish cat’s cradle of cabling that comes with the engine and robo-manual ’box from a Ferrari 458, and the amount of laptop time you’d need to make it do anything? It would be a non-starter, probably literally.
The sorry truth is that, either as a complete unit or broken into its constituent parts, that contentious 458 Spider was so bound up with problems that it was all but worthless, and it’s a shame most car folk didn’t seem to realise that. Don’t get me wrong, I understand the anguished cries from social media, because no one likes to see a nice car get binned off. But this wasn’t a nice car. It was a broken wreck, lashed back together. And it was a 458 Spider. They made thousands of them. The world isn’t worse off for one less, it’s better off for having rooted out a wrong ’un. It’s very sad to watch a good-looking supercar get ripped to bits, but sometimes cars are like animals. Contra to the kerfuffle on the internet, the kindest thing is to put them to sleep.
Read about our drive story for The Ferrari 812 Superfast and GTC4 Lusso T here.