I could tell you it will hit 100km/h from rest in under 3sec and won’t stop accelerating until it’s somewhere the far side of 350km/h and doubtless you’d be very impressed. I could tell you that once you add the power of its 6.3-litre V12 engine to that of its electric motor it produces 950bhp, yet weighs about the same as a small family hatchback. But these are still just numbers.
So let me try to put it in less dry terms. It has more power than Fernando Alonso’s Formula Ferrari, and I mean a lot more. It is the only road car I’ve known whose acceleration from rest is genuinely frightening – even to those standing outside the car. As for the inside, when you put your foot hard down for the first time, what happens next is so alien that the instinct of survival will make your foot lift off the pedal, whether you want it to or not. It will create equally involuntary actions from your passenger who will gasp in air only so that he or she can scream it out again, while his or her right foot stamps frantically at a brake pedal that isn’t there.
Whatever your concept of fast may be, whether it is defined by BMW M3, Porsche 911 or any old common-or-garden normal Ferrari, this one will take it and gleefully burn it before your eyes.
The LaFerrari is not just the fastest Ferrari ever built, it is the fastest car made by mainstream manufacturer ever to wear a numberplate. Some will point to the Bugatti Veyron and note it has even more power and takes even less time to reach 100km/h, but the former advantage is miniscule and obliterated by the over half tonne of extra weight it carries, and the latter simply a function of the Bugatti’s four-wheel drive traction. In any real world scenario, that Bugatti would not see which way this Ferrari went.
Ferrari’s new flagship stands at the centre of a new unholy trinity of hybrid hypercars, flanked by the McLaren P1 and Porsche 918. All use electrical power in much the same way as a Toyota Prius to boost a petrol engine, but to rather greater effect. And of them all it is the Ferrari – the most powerful, lightest and most expensive of the lot – that claims all the saloon bar bragging rights to itself.
So when you approach it, an insect-like study in scarlet from some dystopian future dumped unceremoniously outside the Ferrari gates, you naturally expect some pre-flight ceremony, or at least explanation. But there is none. No one steps forward to hand you a G-suit, neck brace, helmet or weapons-grade sedatives. The door scissors open and as you peer inside, it looks quite a lot like any other Ferrari cabin.
Except it isn’t. There’s no elegant way in, so you sort of tumble, grasping various bits of carbon fibre bodywork to control your descent. Once in you try to adjust the seat but it doesn’t move. This is because you don’t actually sit in a seat, but merely a padded section of the car’s structure. You don’t move to meet the car, it moves to meet you with not only the steering but the entire pedal box telescoping in or out to meet your hands and feet. It’s so comfortable you wonder why more cars aren’t made this way.
The engine blasts into life. It’s not a particularly attractive sound at idle, but it oozes aggression. You can summon up quite a number of different displays on the TFT screen in front of you, all of which will make you feel like a fighter pilot. I choose one with a vast central rev-counter and a red-line at 9250rpm.
It’s easier than you’d think to trickle out into the traffic, largely because your very presence turns you in a red carpet royal among other road users. In Italy where I got to test drive the car, everyone wants to get out of your way.
But driving it fast in public is an exercise in frustration and futility. Even on quiet roads it is so quick it eats the distance between one car and the next in barely discernible time. So it feels like you’re always in traffic. And while overtaking is the work of a blink of the eye, you can never get into a rhythm nor even start to understand what this car will really do. With a car like this it’s not just your licence that’s at risk, it’s your liberty.
Happily Ferrari has a test track, somewhere the LaFerrari is able to express itself fully. And I’d like to say my hour alone at its wheel on the circuit was the most frightening experience I’ve ever had in a car, because that would seem an appropriate thing to say. Except it wasn’t. Forget the power, forget the stats; forget the fact that there are places here it’ll do
280km/h where no other Ferrari I’ve driven will do more than 230km/h. Ferrari’s yet greater achievement is to take unprecedented road car performance and package it in such a way that anyone with just a bit of time, experience and understanding can exploit.
And when you do, it’ll take you to a place no other road car can reach. Any car that can involve you so much you start to feel part of the machine is a rare and exceptional device. The LaFerrari does better than this: it makes the machine feel like part of you. So much so that when they hang out the flag that tells you they’d like their car back, and you slink back to the pits, out of the red insect and into a normal road car, it is the every day, ho-hum tin box that feels like the alien creature, not the LaFerrari.
Ferrari will build 499 LaFerraris and charge €1.2million plus local taxes for each one. But don’t think about ringing your dealer, even if you’re in that league: Ferrari offered the cars only to its most loyal customers and every one sold without its new owner so much as sitting in it. They bet that Ferrari would be true to its word and produce a driving experience unlike any other the world had seen to this point.
If anything, Ferrari has over-delivered.
