Patent filing might point to a future hybrid Ferrari California

 

Four years ago, your author was standing on a balcony in the Monterey Bay fog, a calm, midnight moment during the manic event-to-event scramble of Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance week. In the distance, an engine rumbled--throaty, big, Italian-sounding, but not immediately identifiable.

A 246 Dino emerged out of the gloom, sounding way bigger than any less-than-two-and-a-half liter V6 had a right to. It served as a reminder that Ferrari's brilliance isn't limited to mere eight-and-12-cylinder powerplants, that the company has wrung sonorous power out of even plebeian four-cylinder engines.

So when armchair purists get up in arms about Maranello's dabbling in anything other than naturally aspirated 12-or-eight-pot machinery, it seems like a weensy-minded, blinkered exercise in protectionist memory.

While the Enzo successor is confirmed to be a 12-cylinder-plus-extra-leggera-plus-KERS hybrid monster laying down 920 hp, a configuration presaged by the 599-based Hy-KERS concept from 2010, Car and Driver reports that Ferrari has filed a patent for a more conventional battery/supercapacitor hybrid system.

The filing specifies a 90-degree V angle for the internal-combustion portion of a forward-mounted power pack, which would suggest that the Ferrari-Maserati V8 will see duty, rather than the company's 65-degree V12. While a patent filing sets nothing in stone, it could mean that Maranello is readying a greener version of its drop-top GT named for the Golden State.

Welcome to the Hybrid California? Do we smell colitas? Enough with the Eagles. Has anyone seen our Creedence tape?