Meet the world’s cheapest Ferrari model
Forgotten by many, despised by others, the Ferrari Mondial is today the most accessible model of the Italian brand, although not for every pocket
It doesn’t matter if you’re a car fan or you just don’t care, anyway you’ve ever heard of Ferrari and surely in your mind you’ll have a sports car of immeasurable beauty that you like it or not, you’d like to drive sometime in your life.
And, for those of us who haven’t, there shouldn’t be a more pleasant feeling than accelerating on a European (or Mexican, no matter) highway on a beast with hundreds of horsepower, with a spectacular design and if it’s Italian, much better.
Talking about Ferrari is worthy of an entire library, but there are things that we cannot ignore, because there are models that are really loved by the public who like this brand and others that simply and simply weren’t well received and even passed at night.
That’s what happens with the Ferrari Mondial, a car that always polarized fans of the brand and that really liked it less than expected, and that’s too much in a garage surrounded by legendary cars, great sports cars and even winners of top-level competitions.
The Ferrari Mondial was never one of the fastest, it didn’t come close to being one of the most powerful and for many, it wasn’t even beautiful and this put it in a place that no car wants, that of oblivion, at least until now, because the fact that it’s not a beastly machine, is a vehicle with a logo of the famous Prancing Horse on the in front of the box and it draws more attention when we tell you that it is the cheapest Ferrari model that exists on the planet.
The engine of the Ferrari Mondial is a V8 which, although it is not a bad engine for the rest of the brands, for a Ferrari it is something like a “half engine”, an embarrassment incapable of giving drivers what anyone would expect from a Ferrari, because we are only talking about 214 horsepower, and if we add to that that the vehicle was really Very heavy when it exceeds one and a half tons, so the power is much lower, in fact it takes “calendars” 9.5 seconds to go from 0 to 100 km/h and a lot of effort to accelerate to 238 kilometers per hour, its maximum speed.
But all this isn’t really the problem that made people not want to know anything about the Ferrari Mondial at the time, but the blame was focused on the Bosch injection system, which, since it didn’t have a computer, but only mechanical systems, turned out to be more than a headache, which made it not only a slow and heavy Ferrari, but also unreliable. Although all this meant that today we can say that it is a cheap car, yes, the cheapest Ferrari in the world.
When we say that it is a cheap Ferrari, perhaps for the bulk of the population it is a false statement, because despite its cost, which we will reveal later, it is not exactly available to everyone, but the perception changes if we compare it with some historical models, such as the Ferrari F40 with which it almost shared times and which today is achieved in no time less than 1.5 million dollars.
This Ferrari Mondial can be achieved in a much, much more friendly range, since depending on the year and model it can be obtained from 25 thousand dollars with an average of 30 thousand for the Mondial T and between 35 and 40 thousand for the convertible version. Something with which it is undoubtedly impossible to aspire to one of the most famous Ferrari models.
But not everything has to be negative. The Ferrari Mondial is, despite its mechanical ailments, a very maneuverable car, comfortable inside that has four seats and as if that weren’t enough, it is already considered a “classic”, a very little appreciated one, but it is, in fact, its big problem is the logo, because if it had any other car, it would surely be much appreciated.
The strangest thing about it is that it was a car that went almost unnoticed 40 years ago, but that today has a good dose of advertising due to its price, and that same price is what makes it interesting, because let’s not forget that at the end of the day it was designed by Pininfarina, which not many cars of the same price can boast of, the same as the engine, which although it is as powerful as that of a Cupra, has a peculiarity, the Ferrari signature on it.