Ferrari Tes tarossa

Iconic Italian brand revives a legendary name from the past to create a modern-day supercar masterpiece

- Steve Sutcliffe

THE all-new Ferrari 849 Testarossa. What's not to like about that? Just the name sends a shiver of excitement down one's spine - the 849 part stands for the number of cylinders (eight) followed by the cubic capacity of each cylinder (490) - but if anything, this monstrous new supercar from Ferrari is even more exciting to drive than its intoxicating name would suggest.

At first glance, the headline statistics are pretty mind-blowing: 1,036bhp, 0-62mph in 2.3 seconds, and a top speed of 211mph. But dig more deeply into the spec sheet and you'll discover the new 'Red Head' plugin hybrid Ferrari produces 415kg of downforce at 155mph, has an all-electric range of 15 miles thanks to its 7.45kWh battery, can lap the company's Fiorano track faster than just about any other production Ferrari in history - including the LaFerrari by several whole seconds - and costs an eye-watering £407,617.

So it's an immense kind of car on just about any level you choose to examine it. But never more so than in the flesh, up close and personal, sitting in the pit lane of a race track in southern Spain. Here, its 4.0-litre V8 twin-turbo percolates loudly via two enormous Inconel exhaust pipes in front of an audience of wide-eyed car hacks.

Witnessed in such circumstances, the new 849 Testarossa is a magnificently intimidating car. It looks huge in the flesh, even though it might not be as pretty as some of its more fabled predecessors - to these eyes at least - and the noises it produces are fantastically terrifying. The numbers its powertrain manages to drum up are not exactly underwhelming, either.