The new convertible Portofino is Ferrari’s sleek, simble red panther

Ferrari’s Portofino is so sleek and nimble, even cats stare with envy.

The Ferrari Portofino is every bit as fun to drive as it is jaw-droppingly beautiful.

Jackson is a nine-year-old boy who lives in my neighbourhood. He loves cars, something fierce. “Can you get a Ferrari?” he asked me not long ago. Why, yes, in fact I’m expecting a delivery from the big red stork any day.

And now a Ferrari Portofino grand touring convertible is parked in front of my house. And so is Jackson, not infrequently, just staring at it.

To watch him walk around this $398,888 moonraker — “like the 812 Superfast”, he notes, with the engine in front, “not the F8 Tributo” — is to meet myself 50 years ago, a child absorbing automotive details mnemonically, with unblinking fascination. Jackson is a pistonhead.

I’m a little more reserved in my delight. This is my second time driving a Portofino since the car replaced the California T, circa 2018, and little has changed, or evolved, particularly in the user experience (UX).

That might be a backhanded way of saying the Portofino is still wonderful — a four-wheeled panther, purring, prowling and guttering in the streets. House cats look longingly out of living room windows as it drives by.

And if you’re looking for a 320km/h hairdo, the Portofino — with a masterfully camouflaged retractable hardtop — has a chair waiting for you.

Under the hood is the company’s grandiloquent twin-turbo V8, trumpeting and tromboning and trilling to 7500rpm and 591 hp output. It’s punchy, all right.

With launch control activated, and on an ideal surface — not your ex-husband’s lawn — Ferrari’s least quick car will hit 100km/h in 3.5 seconds.

Bang-bang, goes the dual-clutch automated seven-speed transaxle, your licence is dead.

And yet, the slowing evolution in the UX says something about the company back in Maranello, Italy, since interior updates are particularly cost-sensitive. Did you know car companies have to safety certify even new colours of seat belts? Jackson did.

The Portofino has a new sister car, the Roma coupe, with a wholly new interior design and updated UX, featuring a touch screen in the centre stack. No doubt the Portofino will get the updated interior, probably in the next year. But they didn’t pull it forward this year.

In any event, Ferrari’s finances and future become more conjectural with each new model. The storied racing and sports car powerhouse went public in 2015, having lost its longtime leader Luca Cordero di Montezemolo in a power struggle with the late ­Sergio Marchionne.

The chairman is John Elkann, scion of the Agnelli family; the chief executive is Louis C. Camilleri, chairman of Philip Morris International; and T. Rowe Price is one of its biggest institutional investors. How would you like to change a tyre with this lot?

All parties now seem to agree: it’s time to make money. Ferrari is on track to produce a record 10,000 cars in 2020, and the brand outreach is practically door-to-door in places such as Monaco, Singapore and Beverly Hills. When I first met Montezemolo in 1992, he swore that Ferrari should not, could not, build more than about 5000 cars a year, lest it diminish the desirability of the cars, scarcity being the essence of any luxury brand.

So, the question for Ferrari, and LVMH, and other publicly traded luxury brands: how to reconcile Wall Street’s irresistible expansionism with anything like exclusivity? Do you see the look on that child’s face? Answer me!

And by the way, Jackson thinks the Formula One team is shite and a bunch of wankers. Jackson says you should fire the lot of them, except for driver Charles Leclerc.

When it comes to ultra-expensive cars, perhaps a better word than exclusivity is territoriality. After all, Ferrari’s global production is irrelevant to you as long as there’s only one in your neighbourhood and it’s yours.

And so out here in my part of the world, with its meagre supplies of Italian homewreckers, the ­Portofino might as well have been a one-of-one.

Let’s not be jaded: These cars make people happy — not necessarily owners, but people generally. Luscious in its curves, glorious in its girth, wearing a smile like it’s just spoken to its banker in Zurich, this very fast car had the curious effect of slowing traffic around it. Neighbours idled by as if they were watching a grazing 10-point buck and didn’t want to spook it.

This is not only Ferrari’s most attainable car; it’s also the most approachable in terms of driving and handling. The top notes are agile refinement, ease of effort and other sorts of pain management. The e-assisted steering feels strikingly light on centre, with weight and sensitivity building only as the steering approaches full lock, and not really much then. That’s true in both Comfort and Sport modes.

If the steering feels a bit numb, the car’s actual cornering bite is tremendous. For a big front-­engine convertible, this thing has a real will to turn. Meanwhile, the low-speed effortlessness of the steering, and multiview camera feeds, make parking this six-figure shag-wagon much less fretful than without.

The Portofino’s ride also registers more supple and refined than flinty and hard-edged, relative to other Ferraris. Built on an all-aluminium monocoque, with double-wishbone suspension front and rear, it uses active and adaptive magnetic dampers to give it some range of purpose.

There’s even a “bumpy road” button on the steering wheel that switches the suspension to full soft. File that under liveability, or long-term lease-ability.

The superb retractable hardtop opens on skies where there always seems to be distant thunder: the rumble from the exhaust’s quad outlets. At idle and low rpm, where this car often finds itself, alas, the Portofino does not make pretty sounds — sometimes slobbery, sometimes tugboat-y, a lot of quiet muttering. But the aurality of the car has been universally keyed to the tachometer. When the V8 spins up beyond around 3000rpm, the active exhaust system dilates and the chug becomes a warm, precise warble.

From here the sound widens and ascends in pitch, pressure and ferality, fire-stoked and gorgeous, bawling to its 7500rpm redline. Accountants at nearby cafes raise their heads like meerkats to see what’s the commotion. You’re still in second gear, by the way.

A dedicated grand tourer, the Portofino doesn’t have a Race mode available in its steering-wheel-mounted manettino selector switch. However, an ESC (traction control) Off mode is readily available if some of the neighbourhood kids goad you into doing a burnout.

Of course, that would never happen.

FERRARI PORTOFINO

Engine: 3.9-litre twin-turbo V8 petrol (441kW/760Nm)

Fuel: Average fuel 10.7 litres per 100km

Transmission: Seven-speed dual-clutch automatic, rear-wheel drive

Price: $398,888

The Wall Street Journal