POWER PLAY

It develops 819bhp. It has no turbochargers, no hybrid assistance. Ferrari describes it as the most complete GT it's ever made. And it’s so proud of its mighty V12 engine it’s named the whole car after it. This is the 12 Cilindri

- JAMES TAYLOR

T'S BEEN FILTHY WEATHER EVER SINCE I FIRST DROPPED INTO the new Ferrari 12 Cilindri's low-set driving seat, but, as if by some divine coincidence, the mist rises and the sky begins to clear shortly after we cross the German border and pass a sign with those four tantalising diagonal strips that demarcate an unrestricted stretch of autobahn. Smoothly opening the throttle pedal to its stop in any highperformance car is quite a moment, but when that car has 12 cylinders and revs to 9500rpm...

In this case, though, it's more than an engine, and more than a car, isn't it? The two things together are more than the sum of their parts here because a Ferrari is one thing, but a V12 Ferrari... that's a thing in and of itself, both in automotive culture and to Ferrari as a marque - the first Ferrari in 1947 had 12 cylinders, and 'everything since is a derivation', as Enzo Ferrari once put it.

Perhaps that's why Ferrari has chosen to name its latest V12-powered car after the engine itself. The 12 Cilindri (which sounds a lot better pronounced in Italian, or the closest an English-speaker can get to it phonetically at least: doe-dee-chee chill-in-dree, or '12 cylinder' to you and me) is the successor to the 812 Superfast. When that car's 812 Competizione evolution was launched in 2021 (see issue 292), evo's Adam Towler wondered rhetorically whether it would be the last naturally aspirated V12 Ferrari of its kind.