It appears that someone has grabbed the edges of the horizon and pulled it towards me. As the engine howls and the gears come as quickly as the straights go, there is space in my mind for just one other thought beyond what’s required to conduct this car safely from one place to the next. It looms large, and it is this: if this is the slow one, what the hell are the others going to be like?
For the first 20 years of its existence, every Ferrari road car placed a V12 engine in front of its driver. Indeed, if you restrict your trawl only to cars entitled to call themselves Ferraris (Maranello started building mid-engined V6 cars in 1967, but these were Dinos not Ferraris) you can make that over a quarter of a century, right up to the launch of the Boxer in 1973. To some of the more hardcore elements of the Ferrari cognoscenti, the only true Ferraris are those that come with 12 cylinders ahead of you.
We’d not go that far, not remotely in fact, but there is no denying that a Ferrari with a V12 engine at one end driving the wheels at the other has a purity, a tradition, a pedigree even, that the others lack.
But for the pure, unadorned – some might say unadulterated – front-engined V12 Ferrari, the end of the road is in sight. Because in the future, while 12-cylinder engines will remain in the noses of Ferraris for some time to come, they will no longer act alone, but in conjunction with an electric hybrid system that will no doubt bring more power to Maranello’s flagship, but more weight too. They will be different, better in certain respects I am sure, perhaps worse in others; but different, and decidedly so.
