BLESSED IS THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

FERRARI'S SUPERMODEL ROMA MEETS VICTORIA'S NASTIEST ROAD. GAME ON

- ANDY ENRIGHT

BEAUTY IS ALL very well, but whoever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?" Given that he died in 1950, it's safe to say that George Bernard Shaw never had pause to consider the Ferrari Roma. Arguably Maranello's prettiest car since Donato Coco's 458 Italia of 2010, the Roma pares its adornment back to something almost sculptural and I don't see how you could ever conceive of getting bored of it. But then what do I know? Bernard Shaw won a Nobel Prize in Literature. I won a Scalextric set as an eight-year-old.

As much as the Roma is undoubtedly captivating to behold, here at MOTOR we've been even more intrigued regarding its capacity to hold the attention of keen drivers. Ferrari has positioned the car as a junior GT and, as such, hasn't released a Fiorano lap time for it nor promised anything in the way of more focused variants in the future. Yet so heady are the dynamic abilities of its mid-engined sports cars that we were curious as to whether something a little less extreme would actually make a better sports car for the road. With that in mind we devised a test.

Reefton Spur is well known to most Victorians with a bit of 98RON coursing through their capillaries. Its origins date back to the Victorian gold rush and a 20km cart track was established to haul materiel between the gold workings of Reefton and Jamieson in the 1860s, shortcutting an otherwise 85km trip via Narbethong and Marysville and thence on to Matlock.

The road as we know it today came as a result of another natural bonanza: timber. The post-war building boom meant that during 1947-8, the Forests Commission was able to invest in a major project at the Big River and the Reefton Spur Road was constructed principally as a trucking route for mountain ash sawlogs.