SMOOTH OPERATOR

There's a new baby Ferrari in town, and it's got the potential to make us forget its predecessor altogether

- OLLIE KEW

The Roma was no one's favourite Ferrari. Oh, it was knuckle gnawingly beautiful, if you could accept the weird hole-punched colour-coded grille. Exceedingly fast. Unique in the Prancing Horse stable: the first ever front engined V8 coupe from Maranello. And the Ferrari you were most likely to actually own, partly because it was (at £170k) the least expensive, and partly because it was a necessary stepping stone. Buy a Roma and you lit the fire beneath your backside to climb the ladder. Buy the next Ferrari, and another. Get yourself onto page one of Ferrari's little black book.

But it was also flawed. The Roma's twin turbo V8 was more monotonal than Andy Murray with a hangover. Combine its binary torque splurt with trademark flighty steering and the car was downright sketchy on a greasy road. And you'd be in the hedge quicker than you could say 'why has the voice control interrupted again' if you took your eye off what you could see of the road over its ludicrous bonnet power dome to attempt a prod of its disastrously laggy touchscreen. Or the capacitive touch sensitive steering wheel.

And Ferrari agrees with all of this. It doesn't say so, of course, but ask yourself this: if the Roma had been right first time, why would it have just been replaced with a car that takes exactly the same chassis, engine, gearbox and general philosophy, but leaves no stone unturned in making comprehensive changes everywhere you look and touch? It's not even billed as a 'Modificata', which used to be Ferrari speak for a facelift. It's arrivederci Roma, buongiorno Amalfi.