Hamann’s take on the Ferrari California sports a pretty heavily modified body, including a carbon fibre bonnet, redesigned front spoiler, aerodynamic side skirts and an integrated three-part rear diffuser. Lowered suspension also drops the car right down onto its bespoke lightweight forged alloys.
The Hamann website boasts that the considerable increase in downforce and stability and decrease in unsprung mass from all this gubbins allows them to give the Cali significantly more power – ‘up to 20 per cent’, according to the press release – but don’t ask them how they’ve done it because, so far, they haven’t. Apparently an ECU remap is ‘in preparation’, and a modified exhaust system is planned but yet to be designed. So this launch isn’t really that ‘launchy’ after all.
The whole thing bears more than a passing resemblance to the Mansory 599 GTB, with its black and white colour signature and bulging stance, but perhaps that’s just the fashion at the minute.
Hamann has mucked about with Ferraris before. It once offered a package for the 360 Spider, and in 2006 it had a go at an F430 Spider, with a package bizarrely titled the ‘Black Miracle’. Among the other weird creations that Hamann currently produces are an extensively revised Bentley Continental known as the ‘Imprerator’ (we had to read that twice), and the ‘Tycoon’, a car that manages to make the BMW X6 even odder.