Hemingway staff will always make sure that you hire the right car for the period of time you are hiring, the purpose of the rental and where you are planning to rent but this may give you an idea about some of the strengths of the Ferrari FF.
Sensible. This is a word that was used to describe the four-wheel drive, four-seater Ferrari FF. Picking up a Ferrari from the legendary factory at Maranello and driving it south through the Italian countryside was beyond my boyhood dreams, so thoughts of being sensible were quite a long way from my mind.
First, I was first given a tour of the production facilities, seeing beautiful machinery being put together in an atmosphere of relaxed, Latin precision; I saw a roaring pre-production LaFerrari up close, its haunches so much prettier in the flesh than in photos – the pictures I’d seen may as well have been done with a crayon; I was even granted an audience with Luca di Montezemolo, Ferrari’s capo di tutti capi, before being presented with a gleaming car in a colour called, what else, Rosso Maranello.
I pushed the start button, stirring the vast V12 engine to let out a finely tuned roar, and set off with Robin the photographer. We had a dinner appointment in Tolentino, just over 200 miles south. The internet reckoned it would take three and a half hours, but I figured Ferrari magic would cut this down to about two, meaning we could make it in time. Sadly, all the fun at the factory meant that we hit the full delights of Italian rush hour. For all the horsepower at our disposal, we may as well have had just one, pulling a cart.
Eventually, the traffic started to thin, and for brief moments on clear stretches of autostrada, I was able to unleash the full mayhem of the 6.3-litre engine. The way it accelerates is astonishing, giving a seemingly endless surge of power, even in sixth gear pulling with enough force to dispense with anyone trying to hang on your tail. Clicking down a couple of gears with the paddle shifters is only necessary if you want to show off and hear the symphonic wail as the revs spin beyond 5,000 rpm.
We arrived in time for a delayed dinner and then straight to bed. The drive had been a long disappointment punctuated by a few crazy moments, like a slow cricket match periodically interrupted by streakers. It is not that the car had let us down, just that it hadn’t been given a chance to do what it was made for. So I was determined to make up for it on the return journey.
The reason for choosing Tolentino was that it is the home of Poltrona Frau, the company that makes the all the leather interiors for Ferrari and does design collaborations with everyone from Norman Foster to Renzo Piano. But the last thing I wanted was to allow another factory visit to devour the last chance of daylight and clear roads.
So the alarm went off very early, followed by a rapid sprint around the factory floor where pieces of beautiful leather are lovingly sliced and stamped and stretched over parts destined for the inside of a someone’s personally ordered Ferrari. Then we had time for a tour of the museum showcasing the many glorious designs from Poltrona Frau’s 100-year history. Seeing the craftmanship that goes into the leatherwork was fascinating, particularly for someone who is normally only interested in bits of car that are made of metal.
Leaving in the middle of a sunny winter’s morning, we had time to get back to Maranello the interesting way, so instead of going north we headed west across the Apennines. This meant mountain roads – long, twisting, undulating stretches chiselled out of the beautiful Umbrian hillsides.
This is where any Ferrari really wants to be, and here the FF has one advantage over its stablemates. As well as its ability to carry four adults and their bags in comfort, the FF is the first Ferrari to have four-wheel drive. It is their own patented system that delivers power to the rear wheels, so you can feel the shove from behind that any true sports car has, but if it senses a lack of grip, a proportion of the power is transferred to the front wheels. As I swept out of a tight bend and failed to see a patch of ice, I found myself very grateful for the pull from the front as well as the push from the back.
It also has a very sophisticated traction control system to further reduce your chances of getting into trouble. You can, if unhinged, switch it off altogether, which will unleash enough torque to chew up the tarmac, no matter how clever the four-wheel drive system. Or you can make it extra cautious, for rain and snow. But in Sport mode, it allows some leeway, enabling you to steer with the throttle around tight corners, but stops you from overcooking it and taking an even quicker way down the mountain.
One thing that does focus the mind is the width: being just under 6ft 5in (195cm) across, there were many moments when I found myself involuntarily breathing in as I squeezed into the shrinking gap between truck and crash barrier.
After much joyful tearing around the mountains, it was back on the autostrada to Maranello. Unlike the night before traffic was light, so the only thing slowing us down was the (rarely enforced) speed limit and the desire to stay alive. Unfortunately, the sensation of singing through the gears is so addictive that you just have to keep doing it again and again. I even tried turning on the radio in the hope that it would distract me from just one more crazy-eyed sprint towards the horizon. But it was pointless – there is no Italian pop song that can rival the sound of that engine wailing towards the upper reaches of its vocal range.
When I delivered the FF back to Maranello it was dirty but, mercifully, undented. Sensible? In theory, maybe. But whether it allows you to be sensible when you’re driving it, that is quite another matter.
