► CAR plays delivery driver in a 612
► Maranello to Goodwood via the Alps
► A four-Ferrari, 44-cylinder convoy
As far as I’m aware, no writer for CAR magazine has ever been honoured by the European secretary for trade and industry for services to supercar exporting. Fairly disgraceful considering the number of times we’ve made the trip from Italy to England bearing gifts. Even Saab’s 9-5 replacement is less overdue than some sort of recognition of CAR’s efforts. Perhaps a nice blue plaque somewhere in the Alps might be appropriate. Or failing that, a knighthood or maybe an honorary doctorate.
Two of the stories covering such noble deeds are among the best remembered in CAR magazine’s history. In 1967 LJK Setright collected a Miura from the Lamborghini factory, spilling the beans on what it was really like to pilot the world’s fastest, sexiest supercar and filling us in on the most crucial aspects of its exotic technical content. ‘Considering the length of the crank handle, I found the low gearing ridiculous,’ the great man said of the window winder. Then a decade later Mel Nichols wrote Convoy!, a tale of three Lamborghinis also heading to the UK, and found himself in the unprecedentedly fortunate position of being able to commit to print the immortal words: ‘Rodger took it hard up through the gears’.
Sadly, Rodger wasn’t available for this trip back from Maranello to the UK, but we do have four Ferraris to deliver to the Goodwood Festival of Speed: an F430 Spider, 599 GTB and two 612s, one a very lightly modified car used in Ferrari’s India Tour PR stunt and the second a standard car. We’ll be driving the latter.
No we didn’t draw straws, but I know what you’re thinking. It’s probably fair to say that the 612 is to the current Ferrari range what Tin Machine is to David Bowie’s back catalogue. Time has mellowed the weirdness of the swooping art deco lines but, six years after its debut, it’s still a bit of an eyeful from certain angles. To create the front-mid-mounted layout the front axle sits so unnaturally far forward that it makes the 612 look like it might be hiding a spare wheel in the front wing, Bristol-style.
Admittedly our car on its smart 20in Challenge rims (they come with the HGTC handling pack) is a lot better proportioned than the early 612s, whose 18in front wheels looked like casters. But it’s impossible not to conclude that it would look a lot better with four inches chopped from the wheelbase between the front wheel and the leading edge of the door. It’s a shame because this is by far the cleanest and unfussiest of Ferrari’s cars, its simple style perfectly suited to its role as the genteel elder statesman of the family.
It’s four years since I last sat behind the wheel of a 612. Then the Ferrari was part of a four-way GT test that included the Aston Martin Vanquish, Bentley Continental and Mercedes SL. That never-to-be-forgotten journey took us through the Alps and culminated in a non-stop blast from Portofino on the Italian coast back to Blighty. In a single day.
It didn’t win the test but since then the 612 has become more appealing, following a recent update that added a glass roofpanel, full screen satellite navigation and the superfast gearbox from the 599, which can swap between its six ratios in just 100 milliseconds. It’s not DSG smooth but is much improved, which is just as well because there’s no alternative – the seldom-picked manual has been dropped. What’s more, Ferrari’s technical director, Roberto Fedeli, told me back at Restaurant Montana in Maranello the previous night that the upcoming California will probably be the last new Ferrari to offer a full manual option. That’s sad news, for purists at least.
As we leave Maranello towards Turin traffic is dense, so we’re constantly waiting for the outside lane to clear then fully opening the taps to exploit the free space, playing games as we go, overtaking each other like playful puppies tumbling in a basket. But then for several miles it doesn’t clear and we’re forced to cruise at the same 80mph as the proles in their Bravos. The 612 obliges but it’s unfortunate that the very speed at which most traffic in the world moves coincides with 3000rpm on the Ferrari’s rev counter, exactly the point at which the solenoid-operated second set of exhaust tailpipes open and flood the car with V12 music.And while I appreciate that I’m probably the first person in the world to complain about a Ferrari V12 making too much noise, the constant artificial shift between aaaaaaa and AAAAAAA and back to aaaaaaa again as you modulate the throttle in minute degrees to compensate for shifting traffic speeds soon becomes irksome. I’m guessing you’re not that sympathetic.
I flick the new wheel-mounted manettino down a notch from Race to Comfort, expecting the valve opening point to move to a more sensible 4500rpm, but it makes no difference, at least not to the noise. The manettino made its debut on the Enzo and the facelifted 612 is the last car to get it, giving you the choice of fast gearshifts, bright throttle response, taut suspension and laissez-faire ESP in Race mode or a more languid experience in Comfort.
We stop for lunch at a restaurant near Aosta, where Ferrari PR boss Davide Kluzer translates the various courses between Marlboros. I eat some sort of meat and stodgy carbohydrate and everyone orders water, except for 50-something Giovanni who tucks into a bottle of red to set him up for an afternoon of hardcore Alpine pass climbing and motorway pounding. How very 1970s.
Mel Nichols must have lunched close by before carrying on west to take the Mont Blanc tunnel, which had been completed 12 years earlier in 1965. Strangely he made no mention of what 28 cylinders, 12 cams and 14 gulping carbs sounded like running through seven miles of solid rock and we’re not about to find out how the modern equivalent sounds either, because we’ve chosen to head north, entering Switzerland via the Grand St Bernard Pass.
From 1967 a tunnel has obviated the need to climb over the top, but who wants to sit underground gulping poisonous air when there’s sunshine and hairpins to enjoy? This was Setright’s route in the autumn of 1967, when he brought the UK’s first Miura back from the Sant’Agata factory. Leonard had to share the driving with the importer and was pissed off that he didn’t get to thrash the Lamborghini up the hill to the Swiss border so that he could compare it with a Lotus Elan he’d driven over the same roads earlier that year.
With good reason. The oldest route over the western Alps, named after Bernard of Menthon who set up a hospice there, and in use since the Bronze Age, is only open in summer months. But it’s worth the effort. With 533bhp available, the 612’s ample girth and the roadworks to repair the damage wrought on the tarmac by ice are our only impediment to overcoming the dizzy 2500m climb. The 612 can’t help but watch as the 80bhp stronger 599 smokes off into the distance every time the two throttle pedals are in sync, but it’s no slouch, 62mph coming up in 4.2sec.
I remember driving a 612 in the wet and finding it a real handful, but on these tight, arid bends with the rear-mounted gearbox thrusting the driving wheels into the tarmac it’s difficult to swing the tail wide at all. There’s more understeer than in a 599, but not so much that you can’t tuck the nose in tightly with little effort before giving it the lot and charging off to the next bend.
All too soon we reach the Swiss border post at the top of the pass, a comically run-down white concrete modernist structure, and immediately get a bollocking for driving along while photographer John Wycherley is hanging out of the side of the car taking snaps. What a great commute to work those guards have, blasting up and down the Grand Saint Bernard Pass every day! Beats the M25 I’ll bet. Or maybe they drive Fiats and dream of a dull motorway and a bland office on the outskirts of Slough.
Napoleon’s beleaguered men must have been dreaming of something similar in the summer of 1800, when the tyrannical midget marched 40,000 of them over here on his way to Italy. They consumed 21,000 bottles of wine, a tonne and a half of cheese and 800kg of meat at Bernie’s hospice before doing a runner. Francois Mitterand settled the bill. In 1984.
I can imagine the bill being similar if we’re caught doing the speeds Mel Nichols managed on the motorways over the other side. Thirty years ago the Convoy! convoy cruised through France at 120mph with occasional forays to 140mph, 160mph and, once, 185mph when the Countach got involved in some fisticuffs with an XJS. ‘We hadn’t intended to drive so quickly,’ wrote Nichols. ‘That we should, given the delicious crispness of that early morning, the perfection of that road – those cars – was inevitable; not to have done so would be appalling now for it was only a short time later that the French imposed their speed limits with a savage new will. Such adventures may not be possible again.’
How prescient. These days France teases drivers with its hauntingly empty, perfectly surfaced motorway network, offering some of the best roads in the world for fast driving, but coming down hard on anyone who actually indulges. Police equipped with laser speed detection equipment wait like snipers, and it doesn’t matter that they’re driving a boggo Megane when all they have to do to trap you in your supercar is radio ahead to the next péage.
I have some great memories of tanking through France, cramming well over 120 miles into a single hour. But these days I’m much more comfortable doing big speeds in the UK, despite the stiffer penalties, because the chances of being caught are so much smaller. We settle on a pathetic 95mph, a speed the 612 could probably manage if it lost all compression in 11 cylinders, because we don’t have any cash on us and the French police don’t tend to have chip and pin machines to hand (unlike the thoughtful Austrian police who relieved me of £30 the other month).
The best way to avoid over-indulgence in a car whose natural cruising gait is closer to 110mph is to make good use of cruise control, un-Ferrari-like as it might seem. The 612’s non-radar system is operated from the end of the indicator stalk and isn’t very user-friendly, but it’s a welcome aid to eating up hundreds of miles of northern France. It’s still not a relaxing car to drive though, the steering being as needy as a clingy child even on these glassy smooth roads.
Incredibly, the closer we get to England, the better the weather becomes. And, once across the Channel, as we close in on Goodwood, the roads improve too. Go figure. The A3 is quiet, fast-flowing and fun; the totally unnecessary detour onto the brilliant A272 even better . Now the 612 starts to feel at home. I’m working hard behind the wheel – I wouldn’t want to try to keep this pace up for hours on end, but I am being rewarded.
The Handling GTC pack adds £7656 to the colossal £217,225 a regular Scaglietti costs but the exhaust tweaks, firmer suspension and, most of all, the brilliantly progressive carbon ceramic brakes you get in return make it an essential tick on the order form. So equipped, the 612 feels poised, alert and much lighter than its near-two tonnes. From the way it turns into corners to the crackle from the exhaust as you drop two gears in the slicker, quicker Superfast gearbox, it’s a far more dynamic machine than the one I drove four years ago. More focused, more feelsome, just more Ferrari.
But the wide seats – which I’d been thankful for four years ago when I had to sleep in the 612 after missing the last Eurotunnel crossing of the night – just aren’t snug enough for this sort of driving. It’s an example of the 612’s confusing character. Despite its genuine four-seat cabin the 612 just doesn’t cut it as a GT in the accepted sense. It’s too tiring to drive on a long, fast cross-country blast compared to a Mercedes CL, a Bentley Continental, Brooklands or Rolls-Royce Phantom coupé. Because trapped inside is a Ferrari sports car, just as there should be.
Now, about that OBE.
