When Ferrari launches a new car, you can bet it’s going to be sexy, impractical and red. The new California certainly comes in a sexy shade of red, but Ferrari claims that, unlike most supercars, you can use it every day. To make it driver-friendly, the Maranello factory has fitted a clever automatic gearbox, put a V8 engine at the front instead of in the middle — where it normally sits — and added a metal folding roof.

The result is a car that looks and sounds Italian but behaves like a well-mannered German. It’s so obedient, you suspect it may be something else under the bodywork.

But no, lift the bonnet and there’s Ferrari’s trademark inscription on the engine block — a 453bhp 4.3 litre workhorse almost identical to the one that powers the superb Alfa Romeo 8C Competizione. Press the starter button on the steering wheel and the exhaust burbles through four chromed tailpipes.

As you settle into the leather seats, hand-stitched by Poltrona Frau, the Italian currier, and flip the paddle-shift DCT (dual clutch transmission) out of neutral, you know you’ve been seduced in only the way a Ferrari can. The body panels are pressed from graded aluminium at Ferrari’s Scaglietti works in Modena, and finished with eight coats of paint and lacquer.

The instrument panel backdrop matches the piping on the seats and the seatbelts. There’s a dedication plaque on the dashboard waiting for your name to be inscribed. Come and drive me and don’t pay any attention to those other cars, it says. That’s always been Ferrari’s appeal, of course. However much you try to rationalise it, you want it because you want it.

You’ll be surprised, then, that this car is a gamble for Ferrari — possibly its biggest since Enzo Ferrari told a customer called Ferruccio Lamborghini to go and build his own cars instead of complaining. To begin with, you can’t buy a hard-top version. It comes only as a cabriolet. Enzo would never have countenanced this; his cars were racing cars for the road. The powered roof mechanism adds weight; and when the roof is open the car loses rigidity.

Second, an automatic gearbox is, to Ferrari purists, as sacrilegious as drinking Sori San Lorenzo through a straw (Ferrari says it will introduce a manual version at some stage).

And third, Ferrari’s designers have forsaken the classic aerodynamic wedge for a less aggressive shape that is decidedly more curvaceously feminine. When I arrived in Sicily to drive it last week, it basked in the sunshine like Eva Longoria on a sun lounger.

If we are to believe the industry rumours, this car started life as a Maserati. When the cost of production became too high, it morphed into a Ferrari. As evidence, the rumour-mongers quote the size of the California’s boot (240 litres even with the roof down — enough to fit a decent-sized suitcase or a set of golf clubs). Whoever heard of a supercar having a spacious boot?

The company denies this but freely admits that in the new California it set out to build a car less demanding to drive, easier to get in and out of, roomier and less expensive to run. Its target market includes more women. Just one in 20 of Ferrari buyers is female. Though it won’t say so, the company also wants to steal customers away from Bentley and Mercedes, which have been selling their respective Continental GTCs and SLs by the bucketload. To judge by the interest the car received at the Paris motor show, Ferrari seems to have hit the mark.

The first two years of manufacture — 5,000 cars in all — are already earmarked for individual customers. Doubtless the economic squeeze will cause a few orders to be cancelled, but there will be plenty who don’t have to stretch to afford the £143,320 cost of the car. But by building a car with mass-market appeal, has Ferrari endangered the thing that made it special?

The assembly line at Maranello produces a mere 27 cars a day — a little over 6,000 a year. Each one is unique, with the exception of the engine.

To meet expected levels of demand for the new California, Ferrari has built a new factory alongside the old one at Maranello, increasing its production capacity by up to 50%.

With a projected 2,500 new Californias rolling off the assembly line each year, it’s hard to imagine it ever achieving the same cult status as its ancestor, the original California Spider.

Only 125 of these were made, from 1958 to 1963. One, owned by James Coburn, the late film actor, changed hands at Ferrari’s Leggenda e Passione auction earlier this year for £5.6m, a record sum for a car sold at auction.

Ferrari insists that the extra production of the new California will be taken up in emerging markets (such as China, where 200 Ferraris were sold last year compared with six cars in 2004). Traditional markets — including Britain, which ranks ahead of Italy and behind only Germany (second) and the United States (first) in terms of numbers of Ferraris sold — will receive the same quota of cars they always have. Maybe so. But there’s a sense of trading purity for populism. The Times crossword has just been made easier . . .

It’s even more important, then, that this car drives like a red-blooded Ferrari should. The first impressions are promising. Flip the gearchange through first, second and third and the engine quickly rises from a burble to a howl, with an acceleration that feels as though a large pasta chef has appeared from nowhere and sat on your chest.

Through the switchbacks near the hilltop town of Erice, along the west coast of Sicily, it’s as sure-footed as its front-engined, rear-wheeled layout will allow, and that means very good indeed. A switch on the steering wheel allows you to adjust suspension, traction control and gearbox parameters to suit conditions.

This is a very different machine from the big 12-cylinder Ferraris such as the 612 Scaglietti. They are true grand tourers, long-distance muscle cars. It feels different, too, from Ferrari’s hardcore, mid-engined F430 — not surprising because it’s 275kg heavier and has 30bhp fewer. But if you read those statistics before driving the California, you may be deceived into thinking it’s softer than it is.

Give the car a chance and it’ll prove it’s not just for West Coast show-offs. It reaches 60mph from standstill in less than 4sec — quicker by a whisker than the F430 — thanks to its seven-speed DCT, which changes gear almost instantaneously, and a traction control system borrowed from Ferrari’s Formula One team. Drive it gently and it will pirouette gracefully through even the tightest hairpins. Turn up the power and you can slingshot the car between apexes with the accelerator, gears and brakes working in unison.

There’s a good argument for saying Ferrari, in the California, has built a performance car that, unusually, is as aesthetic as it is functional. Every component has been precision sculptured. Even the disc-brake callipers are colour-matched to the bodywork while incorporating a clever engineering feature to reduce drag. It’s a convergence of CP Snow’s two schools of thought, art and technology. And unlike in most supercars, you can go for a blast, then swing by the supermarket and bring home the shopping in the boot.

Music in the video by Antsy McClain and the Trailer Park Troubadours www.unhitched.com

Ferrari California

ENGINE 4297cc, V8

POWER 453bhp @ 7750rpm

TORQUE 357lb ft @ 5000rpm

TRANSMISSION Seven-speed dual-clutch

FUEL /CO2 21.5mpg / 305g/km

PERFORMANCE 0-62mph: <4sec / top speed 193mph

PRICE £143,320

TAX BAND G (£400 a year)

VERDICT Blisteringly beautiful

RELEASE DATE Order book is open