Pure pace, pure theatre: behind the wheel of the new Ferrari 12 Cilindri
The only thing that could match the unhinged power of Ferrari’s $800,000 new release is the sound generated by its V12 engine. Magnifico! | WATCH THE VIDEO
Oh sure, lots of people think my job is easy. I’ve even had black-hearted employers suggest that writing about shiny new cars is such a lark I should actually pay them to be allowed to do it. But the fact is my role does involve difficult, death-defying days, during which I’m pretty sure I’m shortening my lifespan by failing to breathe for minutes at a time, roiling my insides with a toxic cocktail of cortisol and adrenaline and becoming so dry-mouthed with fear that I’m deliriously dehydrated (the medical effects of all this seem to be a tendency to over-exaggerate and bloviate).
Flying to Luxembourg to drive a new and fantastically narwhal-nosed Ferrari with a voluminous V12 engine probably does sound like a lark, and it could have been a great day except for the fact that it was raining, a lot, and roads in that part of Europe are designed for farm animals and Fiats rather than fat Ferraris. As a fibrillating bonus, I was driving something that looks like it should be in a Museum of Modern Art, or a NASA showroom – and is priced like it, too, at $803,500, which means there would be no such thing as a small accident.
This hugely intimidating Ferrari is called the 12 Cilindri, and yes, it’s a stupid name, but only because you’re reading it in a non-romantic language. In Italian, it is Dodici Cilindri and when it’s pronounced with the proper accent it sounds almost as magnifico as the V12 engine – the thudding heart of this car – it describes.
And no, the Italians don’t care that most people who buy one will not say it properly.
Ferrari is proud to point out that this is now the only new car in the world that comes with a naturally aspirated V12. This might be because everyone else thought it was illegal to make one, because emissions laws would surely have outlawed such excess by now.
The Italians might have performed some engineering magic to squeeze this thing through the eye of the regulatory needle but they haven’t performed miracles in terms of how much fuel a 6.5-litre engine can drink. At one stage my vehicle was suggesting I would get barely more than 400km out of its 92-litre tank (the first EV Ferrari, which is coming soon, will have a better range than that).
And, as you might have guessed, I wasn’t exactly driving it hard because in the slippery conditions I felt like a buffalo on ice skates. Fortunately, Ferraris have a magical setting, “Wet”, which seems to be an Italian term for “Idiota Proof” and basically cuts off enough of the car’s power, in tricky moments, to keep you safe. Unfortunately, motoring journalists have an oversupply of male ego and a befuddled sense of pride in the art of road testing, and thus my colleagues and I were regularly switching to Sport mode – just to stretch the 12 Cilindri’s legs a bit, and to send its hips shimmying out of corners a little. This led to one fellow ending up in an ambulance and one badly smashed-up Ferrari with all its airbags exposed, just because he got slightly off line.
While my hair is even whiter now, I did find some dry patches of joy in the afternoon and in those magical moments I felt this astonishingly unnecessary car coming alive as it revved all the way to its max-power moment at 9250rpm, where it is making 610kW and an almost implausibly intense metallic wail song.
Despite its size and inherent intimidation factor, the 12 Cilindri is gloriously involving to drive, once you’ve acclimatised yourself to the fear, with sharp steering that darts it at apexes, active suspension that makes you feel nailed to the ground and clever aerodynamic flaps that leap out of that gorgeous rear end to deliver much-needed downforce as your speed rises.
Late in the day we were allowed to attempt to drive this fearsomely expensive Ferrari on a racetrack, at which point it helpfully rained again, but I did get the chance to send it soaring into the mid-200km/h range. Apparently the day before, when it was dry, the 12 Cilindri was easily exceeding 300km/h on the same straight.
It has pure pace, then, and pure theatre, with all that unhinged V12 power. Yet it’s very handy around corners and, if you just put it into automatic mode and let the torque do the work instead of the peaky power, it can be a genuinely comfortable long-distance cruiser, too.
What I don’t quite understand, however, is why this car exists, when Ferrari already makes the best car in the known universe, the 296 GTB, which is not only significantly cheaper but sharper, shorter, sexier and faster.
The answer, which I should have thought of, is that the sort of person who will buy the 12 Cilindri already has a 296, and possibly a few other Ferraris as well, and this is merely a different objet d’art on wheels, a double-handed broadsword to go with the katanas. And to hell with the absurd expense.
Clearly, I am in the wrong job.
Ferrari 12 Cilindri
ENGINE: 6.5-litre V12 (610kW/678Nm)
FUEL ECONOMY: 15.5 litres per 100km (this is what you get if you never turn the engine on)
TRANSMISSION: 8-speed automatic, rear-wheel drive
PRICE: $803,500
RATING: 4.5/5
