Steve Sutcliffe gets behind the wheel of the incredible LaFerrari to find out whether it is indeed the world's most exciting hypercar.
But once you do, and to be fair this happens far faster than you’d think, given the vast range of capabilities contained within this most complex of cars, there is a proper box of secrets to be unlocked.
The sheer thrust the thing can generate will scare most people half to death to begin with, for example, because it really is monumentally rapid. And it just never lets up. The acceleration, and the noise, and the violence, it all just keeps on coming at you, stronger and louder with every extra revolution of the crankshaft until the limiter intrudes at an ear-splitting 9250rpm. The first time I run it right up to the limiter in third, the hairs on the back of my neck sit bolt upright, and it’s all I can do not to start screaming uncontrollably for no apparent reason.
And yet, in their way, the gearchange, the brakes, the steering, the turn in, the handling balance and the ride… they are all every bit as incredible as the engine – sorry the power source – and the acceleration it can produce. You look at what this car has on paper and assume that it is going to be a deeply complicated machine to drive, one that perhaps us mere mortals will never get to truly understand, or get the best out of. But that’s not the case at all in reality.
In many ways, the LaFerrari feels as natural and easy to drive as a 458 Italia. Its responses may be massive, its grip vast and its performance envelope borderline insane, but it also feels surprisingly, well, normal in the way it drives. The electronics are there but they operate very much in the background. A bit like the brilliant speech writer for the brilliant speech maker, they are a key element of LaFerrari’s DNA but they don’t define how it feels, or how it drives.
And as for the way you can eventually learn to play with the car, assuming you are bold enough to rotate the mannetino switch right the way round to switch everything off, well it’s just breathtaking. Never before have I driven a mid-engined car that feels so well balanced, so comfortable, when its rear tyres are lit and you’ve got half an armful of corrective lock applied. In my head, in my world, you should not be able to drive a car like this, like that, but believe me; anyone who knows broadly what they are doing behind the wheel could do exactly the same thing in it after a while. And that’s purely because the car has been engineered to allow most people to be able to drive it hard, really hard, without scaring themselves.