DIRTY DOZEN

Ferrari's new super GT makes no secrets about what's under the bonnet, but can it swallow five countries in just a few hours? Better get on with it...

- JASON BARLOW

It's 5:45am and five new Ferraris are parked up, headlights playing high tech tricks with the rain. That's 60 cylinders and 32,480cc. You would expect that lot to generate quite the cacophony but they've settled into a surprisingly subdued idling beat. What gives? Ferrari's chief development driver, the amiable but heroically rapid Raffaele de Simone, was on hand last night to do the briefing, so the prospect of jumping into £400k's worth of hot new Italian supercar before the first coffee of the day is marginally less intimidating. Yet regular Ferrari watchers will know that the company's approach to ergonomics is idiosyncratic. There are fighter aircraft whose cockpits are easier to master. "I know how much you love the capacitive switchgear in our cars," Raffa joked. "We have made some changes." Indeed they have. The 12Cilindri's name isn't the only thing that's been streamlined. The driver's display is a 15.6in multi-configurable one, accessed by a thumb touchpad on the steering wheel whose behaviour is much less hyperactive than before. It's possible to max out the rev counter as is only right and proper in a car whose crankshaft can now spin all the way to 9,500rpm - without retuning the radio or accidentally triggering the ejector seat. The graphics are crisp, cool and legible.

Newly arrived is a smaller central screen for climate control and infotainment, which also handles the Apple CarPlay/Android Auto connectivity thing. There's no inbuilt satnav, Ferrari having concluded that this is how most people use their cars these days. (Does it help that Apple kingpin Eddy Cue sits on Ferrari's board? Possibly.) The new 12Cilindri is a big car, in every sense (4.7m long, 2.1m wide), part of Ferrari's purest bloodline, that of the front-engined GT.