Even better, the body remains flat and unflustered and the front end bites with such vigour that understeer isn’t even a blip on the peripheries of the radar. Oversteer? It’s there for the provoking, but thanks to the steering wheel’s manettino dial – which determines the aggressiveness of the suspension, gearbox, ABS, traction control and stability settings – you’ve got very precise control over the amount of rear-end slip that seeps through. If you’re on a mission, you’ll want to avoid the first two settings and progress straight to Race. Do that and you’ll feel the system intervene, but you won’t get the treacley slow-motion effects4 that often characterise such software – just a neater, quicker and perhaps more boring trajectory through the corner than you would with the electronics neutered.
Want more involvement? CT cuts the traction control and gives what feels like 20 degrees of fun, while CST bins both traction and stability safety nets – you have 670PS under your right foot and you, my boy, are on your own. And yet, with easily anticipated shimmies and super-fast steering that allows you to keep your hands at quarter-to-three on all but the very tightest hairpins, catching a sliding GTO isn’t quite the drama you might imagine. It’s an itch, and you will scratch it.
The improvements don’t end there. These are smooth roads, but the track-biased suspension feels as compliant as it did in the Scuderia. The gearchange is immeasurably better, and it now punches like a – here it comes again – Scuderia with the kind of direct, slightly brutal swaps that only automated manual transmissions can deliver. And the V12 has a greater depth of character than first impressions suggest, perhaps because it’s so quick everywhere in the range that you don’t initially have the spare mental capacity to analyse it.
Low-down it’s responsive and fizzy and multi-layered with a guttural growl. It spins freely and energetically, and, if you use no more than 5000rpm, you’ll still be going at one hell of a lick. But to back out there is to leave the stadium and beat the traffic before the penalty shoot-out. Beyond 5000rpm there’s a slight step, a hardening of resolve as the revs climb more fiercely, and a shriller, scarier exhaust note. Climb towards the 8500rpm redline and the sound morphs into tremulous F1 distortion. Your fingers grip tighter, posture stiffens, eyes widen; rock faces lose their detail and stream a constant grey. Then you pull the carbonfibre paddle and a cacophonous, thunderous whipcrack heralds the next gear. You need a lot of space to repeat the process.
The locals love it. Motorcyclists wave limbs with Tourette’s-like spontaneity, old men in deckchairs on patios punch both fists skywards in approval, van drivers invite us to overtake – not just a nonchalant flick of the indicator, either, but a flamboyant arm windmilling out of the driver’s window to intimate that signore should pass as noisily as possible. Then the strobing headlights in the rear-view. They LOVE it!
Faults are few but present nonetheless. After the silky manners and rapid-fire changes we first experienced on the dual-clutch California, this gearbox feels outmoded as an auto. Floor it to overtake and it’ll stutter like Porky Pig saying ‘mane-mane-manetti – little lever’. There’s no hill-hold function so reversing up gradients can be fraught and smelly (poor clutch), and I’d suggest avoiding the multi-storey altogether.
That said, the six-speeder is still cleverly programmed. Accelerate hard and it’ll drop a cog, but if you then hold the revs constant it won’t change again – it knows you’re on a charge and crave instant performance. It’s also programmed not to change when you slowly feed in the revs – it knows there’s ample torque on hand to avoid a clunky gearchange. But, really, it works best when treated purely as a manual.
Unlike the Scuderia, you can’t isolate the damper and manettino settings, combining the most compliant ride with the most extrovert transmission settings for fast, bumpy roads. Okay, it doesn’t really matter because the car is intended primarily for the track, but surely it would have been easy to give drivers the option.
