I Have Never: Ferrari 550 Maranello

How to go about this one? There is something I want to say about this car, something I would never say lightly, but if I do so right now I will lose all credibility before the end of my first paragraph. I will seem like a small boy at Christmas, babbling through a lengthy appraisal of his new bicycle and why it’s far superior to every other bicycle on the street.

So I will save what might have been my introductory sentence for the very end. That way you’ll see I have actually thought about this quite deeply, not simply made some preposterous declaration on the pinprick of the moment in the excitement of it all. But that’s for later on.

In many ways the Ferrari 550 Maranello is the perfect candidate for the first in my new series, I Have Never. It’s a V12 Ferrari after all, making it an A-lister among fast cars. It hails from just the right sort of era too – the mid-1990s, when I was that excitable boy on his bike, steadily compiling an encyclopaedic knowledge of exotic cars like so many of us did as kids. Most of the cars I drive in this series will be those I admired as a child, but not all. In every case I will be driving them for the very first time.