In a recent column I suggested that the A44, a lovely road that connects my
house with Oxford, should not have a 50mph speed limit. I argued that most
people could see no reason for it and spent most of their time on the wrong
side of the road overtaking the Rover-driving minority who will obey any law
no matter how stupid and pointless it might be.
Inevitably, my views were reported in the Oxford Mail, along with those of
Colin Carritt, who’s mayor of Woodstock, one of the small towns through
which the A44 passes.
Carritt, a former county highways engineer and therefore a man who knows what
he’s talking about, reckons I’m a big bag of nonsense. But sadly, while
making his point, I’m afraid old Col makes a bit of a booboo.
He says: “The accident record on the A44 is not dissimilar to other roads in
the area. It is not an accident blackspot.”
Well Mr Carritt, if it is not an accident blackspot, could you please explain
why there are three fixed speed cameras along its length and one mobile
site? Because, you see, the Department for Transport is very specific on
this. They say that a road must be an accident blackspot before cameras can
be installed.
Actually I don’t mind the Gatsos. They’re in villages and make sense, but the
mobile site, on an open piece of road, has only recently been installed. And
now the local mayor is saying there’s no reason for it. Good. I expect it to
be removed this instant. And if it isn’t, I shall pull over and ask the
civil servant who operates it why not. If he has no sensible answer, I may
have to arrest him and confiscate his van.
I love it when this happens — when authority figures desperately trying to
defend the indefensible come a cropper. We see it with climate-change
scaremongers who are trying to argue — preposterously — that the only way to
prevent the end of the world is to give Gordon Brown five pounds.
Unfortunately, in the big scheme of things, a lone voice discovering that one
mobile speed camera is in the wrong place is nothing but a gnat bite on the
elephant hide of lunacy that is being used to suffocate Britain’s motorists
under a blanket of rules and fines.
It’s such an all-enveloping blanket in fact that, for the first time ever,
last week I actually began to feel that soon there will be nowhere left for
people who like cars to have some fun. And that’s a shame, because I was
driving a Ferrari 599.
There was just the most awful, paralysing sense that if I ever mashed my foot
into the carpet I’d go from zero to the local magistrates’ court even faster
than I’d get from zero to 60mph. And what’s the point of overtaking a Rover
when round the next bend you know there’s going to be another. And that in
the next village a hippie will throw eggs at you because your V12 is making
the sky ill.
For the first time ever, I began to feel that the truly fast car might soon
become — I hate to say this — pointless.
There are other reasons, too, why you might not want to buy a 599. The first
time I climbed aboard it was a dark, swirly sort of night, soggy from the
kind of drizzle you can neither see nor feel but which causes you to be
soaked in moments.
The 599 was hopeless. Its automatic wipers couldn’t cope, either not working
at all or scraping themselves noisily over a bone-dry screen. The headlights
had the power of candles in jam jars. The heater wouldn’t heat and the
air-conditioning wouldn’t chill. Furthermore, the radio was all in German
and the sheer size of the thing made it a nightmare on the tiny lanes round
these parts.
Ferrari may have designed the 599 to be a comfortable long-distance cruiser.
They may have thought hard about making it a usable everyday car, but as I
picked my way along the verge, squeezing past Minis coming the other way,
and being dazzled by the “ambient” interior lighting, it was immediately
obvious that they’d failed completely. It’d have been easier to
circumnavigate the Arc de Triomphe in a rickshaw.
And then there’s the steering wheel. Oh deary me. What were they thinking of?
For the most part the interior is a typically beautiful blend of hide and
style; as classically Italian as Sophia Loren’s sunglasses. But there, right
in the middle of everything, is a quartic steering wheel. Yup, quartic, as
in square, as in Austin Allegro.
And worse still, it’s half carbon fibre and half leather, and it’s got all
sorts of Formula One-style buttons on the bottom and then, along the top, a
series of red lights that come on to tell you when to change gear.
Unfortunately they are so bright you think you’ve been caught in the
fearsome glare from a Martian spaceship. So you don’t change gear. You
crash.
I loathe the way they’ve shoehorned this Formula One trinketry into such an
elegant space nearly as much as I loathe the way that under the bonnet
they’ve fitted a sort of Formula One nose cone over the radiators. This
implies that customers will raise the bonnet to show the engine off to
friends. And that’s like taking your penis out at a party. It’s a terrible
thing to do.
I wish I could move on to the good stuff at this point. But I’m afraid not.
The passenger seat rattled, and a wonky diff meant that in a slow
right-angled turn the whole rear end juddered as the inner wheel failed to
cope with the outer wheel’s higher speed. How can Ferrari fail where even
the Belgian army can succeed? Oh, and then there’s the flappy paddle
gearbox, something only the poseur will choose. In its normal setting it’s
only mildly terrible but put it in “race”, which speeds up the change action
by a degree no human would notice, and it damn nearly pulls your head off
every time it swaps cogs.
So couple all these faults to a car with a pointless turn of speed and you’re
left with something more useless than a bright green spy. Certainly, you’d
have a job explaining to a visitor from outer space why you would spend,
with extras, £200,000 on a car that doesn’t really work when it’s dark, or
raining, or if the road’s a bit narrow, or even if it isn’t. He’d wonder,
I’m sure, why you wouldn’t buy a Honda Jazz instead.
And yet . . .
You only need crawl along at 20mph in first and listen to that hollow,
plaintive cry from the exhausts. You only need prod the throttle from time
to time and feel the surge from that Enzo engine. You only need sweep
through a really lovely, well-cambered bend. And you’ll know you are driving
something so utterly magical that saying no because the lights don’t work
properly is like saying no to Cindy Crawford because she has a mole.
After just three days the power and the excess that had originally caused me
to question this car were now causing me to drool and dribble.
Because, as a piece of automotive engineering, the 599 is biblically,
stratospherically, crushingly brilliant. Even at normal speeds on normal
roads you know that you’re in a thoroughbred. You can feel it straining. You
can hear it working. You know that if by some miracle you are presented with
a piece of road which is wide and open and free from Rovers and speed
cameras, it would deliver a hammer blow big enough to knock down the doors
of Fort Knox.
It accelerates with a savagery known only to silly mid-engined supercars or
plastic bathtubs from Caterham. It rides on its tall tyres with a composure
that’s almost diplomatic in its smoothness. And believe me on this: it looks
a trillion times better in the flesh than it does in the pictures. It’s not
pretty but it has the brooding presence of a mafia hitman.
Yes, Aston Martin can sell you a better looking two-seat GT car for half the
price. Yes, Porsche can sell you a wilder ride and yes, in the current
climate, a helicopter would be a better long distance tool. But none of
these things feels quite so gratifying, or sorted, or sensational as the
599.
One day cars like this will be outlawed by a combination of laws and dirty
looks. But until that day comes, put up with the many, many foibles and
irritations. And just get one.
VITAL STATISTICS
Model Ferrari 599 GTB Fiorano
Engine 5999cc, 12 cylinders
Power 612bhp @ 7600rpm
Torque 448 lb ft @ 5600rpm
Transmission Six-speed F1 paddleshift
Fuel/CO2 13.3mpg (combined) / 490g/km
Acceleration 0-62mph: 3.7sec
Top speed 205mph
Price £177,325
Rating 4/5
Verdict Senseless but sensational
