WAR HORSE

This sensational Ferrari 550 Maranello Prodrive competed at Le Mans no fewer than five times. Now it's our turn to get behind the wheel

- by HENRY CATCHPOLE

AND SO THE REAL REASON THAT THE TSAR WAS overthrown was...? Smith...? SMITH?!?!'

But Smith isn't thinking about a chilly Petrograd and the fate of Nicholas II in 1917. There is a window open in the classroom and carrying on the warm breeze is another voice, an Italian-British one, that is instead transporting Smith to the Mulsanne circa 2003. A distant shriek is rising above the usual lazy summer sounds of a Tuesday morning in Surrey. At this remove of several miles, the side-exit-symphony is little more than the volume of a sleepy summer wasp, but it's intoxicating. Smith's attention has as much resistance as Odysseus to the sirens.

Thirty years ago it was me in that classroom in the school just down the road from Dunsfold. There was no danger of hearing a V12 exercising its vocal cords at that time because the airfield had yet to become the test track for a TV show and instead was still a home to Harriers of the jump jet variety. In all honesty I'm not sure if the sound would quite have carried anyway, but from where I'm standing it feels like the whole of the South of England must be aware of our presence, or rather the presence of a 6-litre, naturally aspirated V12.

The engine is nestled under the long, louvred bonnet of a Ferrari 550 Prodrive, specifically chassis CRD03, which featured in Adam Towler's excellent Anatomy of a Race Car feature in issue 286 (and which you can still read online). It looks slightly different today because since it last graced these pages the Peter Stevens-sculpted carbonfibre bodywork has been swapped from its red 2004 livery, with the names of McRae, Turner and Rydel above the door, to its 2003 form.