Ferrari 488 Pista review: how can I poke fun at something like this?

Way too expensive, badly equipped and made by a company that hates you. So far, so good.

Ferrari 488 Pista, $645,000

I bought a Ferrari once. I’d been making a TV program about Italy and figured that to bring some spectacle and noise to the endless parade of food and suits, it would be a good idea to borrow something called an F355. And my God, that Ferrari opened my eyes to a world I didn’t know existed. A blurry world. A world of G-force and curious sensations in the seat of my pants. “Wow,” I shouted at the camera. “This car has five valves per cylinder.” I then paused, dropped it down a cog and yelled: “And you can tell.”

After making a few observations about sexuality and adding a couple of weird similes, I came back to Britain in a pensive frame of mind. Because I just had to have one. It was how I’d imagined cars would be when I was young. Full of fire and brimstone. Connected directly to the driver’s sex glands.

I went for the GTS model, and because I was a Ferrari new boy I did the Ferrari new-boy thing and ordered it in red, with cream-and-red seats, and red carpets. “Ah, I see you’ve gone for the homosexual pack,” said comic actor Steve Coogan, who had an F355 too.

Since those days, many things have happened. Steve’s become very right-on, I’ve grown out of mid-engine supercars and Ferrari has become so up itself that it prefers customers to arrive at the showroom on a superyacht, via a canal that’s been specially dug by an army of eunuchs.

It’s why I went on to buy a Lamborghini Gallardo and then a Ford GT. And it’s why, if I absolutely had to have a mid-engine supercar these days, I’d buy a McLaren. It’s also why, when I review a Ferrari, I now want to say it’s awful, just to piss the company off.

All of which brings me to the limited-edition 488 Pista, which is a stupid name. It means “track”. Which means this car is aimed at the sort of man who has his own racing circuit, possibly in Qatar. And cars that are designed for tracks in the Middle East rarely work well on damp roads in England.

It’s fitted with a four-point harness that prevents you from leaning forward to see what’s coming at junctions. It has no sat nav and very little soundproofing, to save weight. And Ferrari continues to make the controls almost impossible to use by putting most of them on the steering wheel. Which means they’re never where you left them. Oh, and then there’s the price.

So it’s far too expensive, badly equipped, made by a company that hates you and fitted with seatbelts that mean that at every oblique junction you must rub the rosaries and hope for the best.

So far, so good. Ferrari will be very cross, and that makes me happy. However, despite all the problems, the Pista is one of the most thrilling, beautiful and satisfying cars ever made. It makes all other cars feel as though they’re built from moss and bark. It is superb.

There was a time when any car, even a Ferrari, struggled to cope with 530kW. The back end would skitter about, and you could never – not on the road, at any rate – use full throttle in any gear for more than a second or two. It’s not like that in the Pista. To make the engine feel naturally aspirated, the torque is limited in the first six gears. So you don’t get that wheel-spinning madness. Which means you don’t get the terror. This, then, is a car you can drive fast. That you’ll want to drive fast. And then there’s the handling, which is faultless. You find yourself going round corners at ridiculously high speeds without a chirp of protest from the tyres.

You’d imagine that, to achieve this, the suspension was harder than a communist’s heart, but no; put it in Bumpy Road setting and it glides along. The engine note isn’t particularly exciting – it doesn’t make a noise like 4000 metres of ripping calico – but even with very little deadening material under the carpet, it’s not bad at all. It even has a surprisingly large boot.

After a few days I began to question my vow that I would never buy another mid-engine car. And certainly not a Ferrari. Because the Pista is not just good. Or brilliant. It’s way beyond that.

Ferrari 488 Pista

Engine: 3.9-litre twin-turbo V8 petrol (530kW/770Nm)

Average fuel: 11.5 litres per 100km

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

Price: $645,000

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars