2016 Ferrari F12tdf review

Easy, forgiving and surprisingly docile: just some of the words that will never be used by anyone to describe what this car is like to drive. From the moment the mighty V12 blasts into life, this car lays down a challenge. The prize is a driving experience unique among road cars, and yes, I include the McLaren P1, LaFerrari and Porsche 918 in that, the price being that you’re going to have to fight every inch of the way to get it.

There is little this car does to make life easy for you. On the user-friendly side, while the ride is now very hard, it remains impressively smooth, and the car is still quite quiet on the motorway and it still has a surprisingly big boot. The thin bucket seats with their four-point harnesses are brilliantly supportive, too. So the standard F12’s superb long-distance credentials, while degraded, remain intact.

But sooner or later you’re going to want to drive it fast, and if it's cold and/or wet, I wish you luck. Firstly it tries to deter you: on country roads those fat front tyres hunt about like bloodhounds following a scent, and on Pirelli Corsa tyres and with super-stiff springs, traction can be challenged even just easing away from quiet junctions. The traction control can’t always keep up even in its Wet setting. The car retains the F12’s super-aggressive off-centre steering response despite the four-wheel steer’s ability to effectively lengthen the wheelbase. And when the back goes, you’ll need to be as fast with the corrective lock as I’ve known a road car from a mainstream manufacturer to require, just to make sure it doesn’t stay gone.

And yet there’s this other thing going on too. The car has an addictive quality that makes you feel like a moth drawn to a flame. The tdf is so hard to drive in difficult conditions, so different indeed, that you find yourself fascinated, fixated even, on finding out more. Partly this is because of the engine, the most free-spinning, free-spirited, simply bloody heroic road car powerplant I can recall, more unhinged in its appetite for revs even than that in LaFerrari.

But there remains this suspicion that if you are able to bend it to your will, or even adapt yourself to its way of doing things, something sublime awaits. And even on the narrow, wet and cold roads that must comprise a tdf’s worst nightmare, it proved to be one of the most exciting cars I have ever driven.