Ferrari 599 GTO test drive

The car you are looking at is, quite simply, the fastest, most powerful road car that Ferrari has ever built. It’s called the 599 GTO and it takes the idea of the front-engined V12 GT car to an entirely new level dynamically.

Thanks to an exhaustive program of upgrades not just to its engine, gearbox and chassis but also to its braking system, aerodynamics and electronics, the 599 GTO can lap the company’s Fiorano test track faster even than the £1 million mid-engined Enzo.

It promises to provide a level of driver feedback and digital interaction that has never before been available on a production Ferrari, yet it is also more economical and cleaner than the regular 599 GTB.

Essentially a road-legal version of the extraordinary 599XX, the GTO features numerous design and engineering aspects that were pioneered on its track-only sibling. The V12 engine, just like that of the 599XX, has been “super-polished” internally and features a “diamond-like carbon” coating on its hydraulic tappets that increases its overall efficiency (compared with the GTB unit) by an impressive 12 per cent.

The headline power and torque figures make impressive enough reading on their own; the GTO’s 6.0-litre V12 produces a whopping 661bhp at 8250rpm and 63.18kgm of torque at 6500rpm.

So how potent is this 1605kg machine? On the road – and in the raw – the 599 GTO is one of those rare cars that requires you to think long and hard before climbing aboard, thumbing the starter button and going for a blast up the road. Visually it is both fantastically intimidating and breathtakingly beautiful, with wings and orifices to inhale and dispel the air that feeds it seemingly everywhere you look.

Climb aboard and hunker down into its high-backed bucket seat and the sense of purpose is almost overwhelming. From its carbonfibre instrument surrounds to its drilled alloy pedals and its 10,000rpm rev counter, the GTO feels every inch like a road-legalised racing car inside, albeit with a certain nod towards civility.

When you do fire it up and give it a burst of revs for no particular reason, it sounds completely and utterly fantastic. The noise is so complex, and so rich, that you could happily sit there and just listen to it all day. But it sounds even better on the move, under load, screaming up its vast rev range through second, then third, then fourth – almost as quickly as you can read this sentence.

The acceleration this car can summon in pretty much any gear and at any speed below 274kph – and the noise it generates while doing so – is actually quite uncomfortable to begin with when experienced within the confines of a public road. In fifth gear it feels as potent as a Porsche 911 does in third, and in second gear it’s just crackers fast.

The GTO rides almost as well as it handles if you play around with its various manettino settings; it steers every bit as brilliantly as it stops, and it changes gear just as incisively as it turns in.

As a whole, it feels entirely different from, and vastly superior to, the regular 599 GTB in every way dynamically – be that on the road, track or even just bumbling along the local high street, where it tends to generate rather a lot of attention, whether you like it or not. It feels like a totally different car, to be honest.

Ferrari isn’t exaggerating when it describes the GTO as a road-legal version of the 599XX – as opposed to an uprated version of the GTB. This is a genuine landmark car for Ferrari. It’s also a proper, bona fide addition to the GTO family, make absolutely no mistake about that.

Test conducted by Autocar UK