Competizione offers furious final fling with fossil fuel

Maranello

I HAVE driven the perfect car, and the Ferrari 812 Competizione is it. Obviously it's not much good for an Ikea run, or even a school run since it's a two-seater, but to anyone with at least a single drop of petrol in their veins, the Competizione is utter flawlessness on four wheels.

I'm not one to put Ferraris on a pedestal just because the brand embodies everything glamorous and exciting about motor racing - even if most of the models in the current line-up make me wish I had the good fortune to win the lottery - but the 812 Competizione feels like God's gift to keen drivers.

The model designation is a big, fat hint of that, considering the Competizione is a lighter, sharper, more powerful version of a front-engined car called the Superfast, which very much lives up to its name.

Even that oversimplifies it, because the level of effort Ferrari poured into making the Superfast faster simply boggles the mind.

Start with the heart of any Ferrari. The Superfast's 6.5-litre V12 sends 800 horsepower to the rear wheels, and the Competizione has 30 hp more.

That sounds like a trifling number, but it involved giving the engine new pistons, lighter connecting rods, a diamond-like coating on some surfaces to reduce friction, a lighter crankshaft, a new cylinder head, camshafts made with Formula One racing tech and a new intake, plus a redesigned cooling system.

All that for a mere 30 horsepower gain? That gives you some idea of how hard you have to work to make a masterpiece better.

A similar sense of no-stone-unturned engineering pervades the rest of the car, with weight reduction, suspension tuning and aerodynamics all coming under the intense focus of the development team.

You can't really see how they've lightened the car or worked on its undercarriage, but the aero modifications are unmissable. Various slats, winglets and scoops shape the airflow to either cool components, reduce drag or press the car to the road at speed, but all that is a part of the regular Ferrari playbook.

What arrests your eyes on the 812 Competizione is the huge carbon blade that bisects the lengthy bonnet, and the fixed panel that replaces the rear window, festooned with aggressive vortex generators (plus a small camera so you can still see what car you've just overtaken).

At 200 km/h, the Competizione has 80kg more downforce pushing it to the tarmac than Superfast, and those protuberances on the rear panel account for 10 per cent of it by themselves, but they do a lot to make the car look like it's sneaked off the starting grid of a GT race and onto the street.

Yet, while the carbon blade and that rear panel turn the 812 Competizione into something to gawp at, they also visually shift the mass of the car away from the front, and playfully trick observers into thinking the car's V12 resides in the back, which is where a racing car would have its engine. That seems highly appropriate, because the 812 Competizone drives like a rear-engine racer.

A handful of laps at Ferrari's private test circuit is all I had with the car, but I will treasure the memory of them for all time.

The Competizione's interior isn't radically different from that of the 812 Superfast, but the comparisons pretty much end there, and that much became apparent the first time I lunged into Fiorano's tight first corner, trying to keep up with Ferrari's chief test driver Raffaele de Simone ahead of me.

As you'd expect, the 812 Competizione is a wickedly, supremely fast car, but it's the character of the engine that marks it out as something special. It picks up speed with a relentless and angry fervour, like a beast that can't contain itself, and the howl from its 12 cylinders is as much a cultural experience as any of Verdi's operas.

It revs all the way to 9,500 rpm, the sort of speed where an engine really hits the high notes.

For all that, the 812 Competizione could not be less scary to drive, because its chassis is the most immaculately sorted I have ever experienced.

The Ferrari flicks into bends with the light, breezy effortlessness that seems impossible of a car with a big V12 engine up front, and it holds a steady line all the way through them with impeccable precision.

There's an implausible amount of traction, too, though the rear tyres do struggle to cope with the monster engine. But the unbelievable thing about the Ferrari is how readily it allows the driver to take liberties with the accelerator pedal.

Push down hard and the traction control system releases just enough power to launch you violently out of a bend at what feels like the greatest possible rate.

Or switch the driving mode to CT Off and the car gives you ready tail slides that you can hold or gather back up with that fast, accurate steering.

Of course, the Ferrari does much of the work for you, and a lot of that is down to a new rear wheel steering system that can swivel each of the back wheels independently.

You never actually feel it doing anything, which is a trick in itself, but the new system makes the 812 Competizione super stable under heavy braking, super agile when you turn in, and super controllable as you power all the way through the bend, even if the rear tyres have started smoking by then.

Unbelievably, it accomplishes all this by making the tiniest adjustments. "The rear wheels steer up to 4 degrees," di Simone tells me. "But we use not more than 1 degree."

Ultimately, if you think about everything a fast car has to do well - accelerate, brake, change direction quickly yet offer stability - the 812 Competition nails them all, and does it in style and with commanding ease. If driving it doesn't take your breath away, it will be because you're become a corpse and just haven't realised it yet.

But there's an undercurrent of sadness to this car. Ferrari hasn't actually come out to say it, but everyone thinks the 812 Competizione is going to be its final new car with a pure combustion V12.

Tightening emissions regulations have put Enzo Ferrari's most beloved kind of engine on death row, and the company looks likely to replace 12 cylinders with 8 and fill the gap with electric motors.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, as Ferrari's uber powerful SF 90 shows, but it does mean that buyers of the 999 units of the 812 Competizione (plus 599 more of a targa-top version) are on to a good thing. All of them (the cars, not the buyers) will surely rise in value.

Not that it matters at this point, because like all the collectible Ferraris, the 812 Competizione quickly sold out before it even made its global debut in May this year. The customers that Ferrari invited to buy the car must be doing cartwheels, but for everyone else, perfection remains out of reach.

Ferrari 812 Competizione

Engine 6,496 cc, V12 Power 830 hp at 9,250 rpm Torque 692 Nm at 7,000 rpm Gearbox 7-speed twin-clutch automatic 0-100km/h 2.85 seconds Top Speed More than 340 km/h Fuel Efficiency 16.9 L/100km Agent Ital Auto Price S$2 million (estimated) Available Sorry, you're too late!