The Ferrari F8’s Twin-Turbo V8, and What It Costs to Keep

The engine in the Ferrari F8 Tributo won International Engine of the Year four years running, from 2016 to 2019. In 2018 it was named the most significant engine of the award’s first twenty years.

It is a 3,902cc twin-turbocharged V8 making 530kW and 770Nm, and it is the last of its kind. Every mid-engined Ferrari since has either had an electric motor attached or has been something else entirely.

Here is what makes it worth understanding, and what living with one in Australia actually involves.

Why this engine mattered

Turbocharging arrived at Ferrari with a problem attached. Turbos make power easily, but they introduce a delay between your right foot and the response, and for a company whose reputation was built on naturally aspirated engines that revved to the moon, that delay was close to unacceptable.

The answer was to engineer the delay out rather than accept it. Small, light turbochargers spinning up fast, a flat plane crankshaft, and torque delivery deliberately shaped so that lower gears feel progressively stronger rather than dumping everything at once.

The result does not feel like a turbo engine in the way turbo engines used to feel. That is the achievement, and it is why the awards kept coming.

What it is like to live with

This is where most articles reach for a servicing figure. We are not going to, and it is worth explaining why.

No Australian Ferrari dealer or independent specialist publishes menu pricing for a major service on this engine. We looked. Workshops here advertise their capability and their credentials, not their prices, which is standard for the segment. The priced service menus that do exist online are American and British, and converting those into Australian dollars would be misleading, because parts freight, local labour rates and GST all move the number.

So if you see a confident dollar figure for servicing an F8 in Australia, ask where it came from.

The part that actually answers the question

For a lot of F8 owners, the honest answer to “what does servicing cost” is: nothing yet.

Every new Ferrari comes with seven years of Genuine Maintenance included from first delivery. It covers scheduled servicing, including labour, genuine parts, lubricants, engine oil and brake fluid, with no kilometre limit. Crucially, it attaches to the car rather than the buyer, so it carries across to a second owner within that window.

The F8 Tributo was built between 2019 and 2023. Do the arithmetic and a large share of the F8s in Australia are still inside their Genuine Maintenance period right now, and some will be for another few years.

That changes the buying calculation. When you are looking at a used F8, the question is not just what it will cost to service. It is how much of the seven years is left, and whether the seller can prove the scheduled work has actually been done on time.

What the program does not cover is wear. Brakes, tyres, clutch and consumables are yours, and on a car making 530kW none of those are cheap. We have written separately about what supercar tyres cost in Australia, which is the expense that surprises people most.

What goes wrong

Here we have to be careful, because the honest answer is that nobody has published a proper study of it.

There is no Australian recall, no manufacturer bulletin we could find, and no independent investigation into long term reliability of this engine family. What exists is owner discussion, and owner discussion has a well known bias: people who have a problem post about it, and people who do not, do not.

Owners most commonly raise turbocharger oil seal wear, showing up as smoke on start up, generally on higher kilometre or modified cars. Take that as what it is, a pattern in conversation rather than a documented failure rate.

The broader picture is that this engine is considered robust by the standards of turbocharged supercar engines. If you want certainty about a specific car, a pre-purchase inspection by a Ferrari specialist will tell you more than any amount of reading. We have covered what that inspection should include in how to inspect a used supercar.

What replaced it

The 296 GTB, effectively, and it went in a completely different direction: a 3.0 litre twin-turbo V6 with an electric motor, making 610kW combined.

Eighty more kilowatts from two fewer cylinders, with the electric motor filling in while the turbos spool. The 296 is quicker everywhere. Whether it is more satisfying is a question owners answer differently, and we have gone through the whole comparison in what replaced the Ferrari F8 Tributo.

Which brings us back to why the F8’s engine is worth caring about. It is the end of a line that runs from the 458 through the 488, and Ferrari will not build another mid-engined V8 without electrification. Cars at the end of a line tend to be looked at differently later.

Specifications in this article were checked in August 2026. Australian pricing for the F8 Tributo when new was $484,888 before on-road costs, as recorded in our vehicle database in July 2026.