Yahoo Autos The Dual Personalities of the Ferrari F12berlinetta
Seven hundred and thirty horsepower. It's a considerable number. The sort of number that gives you pause, that it might be a typo or a mistake. Or that you might be dealing with a car that in no way could be road legal.
When the Ferrari F12berlinetta debuted way back in 2012 and it was announced that it'd have 730 naturally aspirated horsepower, we were all astonished. "It'll be unusably fast," we said. "How can that work on the road?" we murmured. We had reason to feel this way: It was the most powerful naturally aspirated production car Ferrari had ever released; it had more power than an Enzo, and that wasn't known as a car for shrinking violets.
When it was first released, many felt that the F12 was approachable, but it was also fast. Like too fast. As a person who feels like that isn't actually possible, I had reservations. But then I was offered the chance to take an F12 the long way from Los Angeles to Monterey in order find out if it was, actually, "too fast."
It's not. But what's more amazing is how the F12 functions like a normal, average, everyday car.
The usual thought is that a car with a prancing horse on it is unusable to go from place to place, that you can't run errands in it, you can't leave it places, or that you can't even go over a small bump with it without ripping off the front end.
While yes, it does attract more attention than a Prius does, it's actually adept at all these things. On the day we were set to drive out of Los Angeles, we immediately hit a snag: Traffic. Now, yes, LA is known for traffic, but this was different. It was 8 AM on a Thursday and we were on the PCH in Malibu, not usually a place known for traffic. But on this day, a gravel truck had flipped, blocking all the lanes of the seaside highway.
This meant bumper to bumper traffic for hours. You'd normally expect that a Ferrari would overheat or be a huge pain to just sit in. After all, this is an exotic car, and exotic cars are known the world over as finicky. Not the case here. It was just another car in traffic, especially in Malibu, where an F12 is seen as a car for commoners.
That's the truly remarkable part here, when you aren't thrashing on it, the F12 is just a car. A 730 horsepower car that can kill any back road or track is not really what you'd think of as a great car to drive in traffic. Shockingly, it is.
It's also not what you'd think of as the ideal ride for hours of monotonous highway driving, which was now necessitated because of the earlier traffic. The niggles? Well, the tire noise was rather loud, but that was on bad pavement. There is another niggle: The car tricks you into thinking you're going slower than you are.
An F12 at 60 mph feels like a Camry at 25 mph. So you go faster. Then you look down and realize that the speed you were doing might even be illegal in Germany, so you back it down. Then you see an F50 on the road ahead-as you do when heading to Pebble Beach-and you can easily hit that speed again to catch up and gawk at it.
But the highway is boring otherwise. Thankfully, the Ferrari's nav system realized this, and in order to get us to our destination, it decided that we'd need to get off the 101 and take the entire back section of Carmel Valley Road. For those who don't know, Carmel Valley Road is mile after mile of deserted excellence, with wineries, farms, few homes, fewer cars, and actual banking in a lot of corners. It was designed by someone who wanted the long drive in the middle of nowhere to at least be fun.
It's also the perfect road to see the duality of the F12. What is calm and docile around town becomes a madman on a backroad, and I mean that in the best possible way. Ferrari has built something seriously special.
On this amazing road, the car that felt solid, comfortable, and, frankly, slightly boring in traffic and on the highway transforms into something totally different. As with the exceptional 488, the front end of the F12 feels like nothing else on the road. I don't mean literally, like, if you run your hand over the sheetmetal. I mean how the steering feels.
The rack is impossibly quick and turn in is impeccably sharp. The more you drive it, the more the steering will impress you. You'll also realize that you're nowhere near the limits of the chassis on the road. In that respect, yes, the F12 might be too fast. But unlike a lot of cars with this amount of power or limits this high, it's actually fun to drive at speeds that aren't obscene.
If you combine the way the steering feels with how the V12 sounds and the brakes (which are incredible) feel, you have a car that is shockingly connected and analog in a world of cars that are digital and only come alive when you start thrashing them hard on a track.
That might be the biggest shock of the F12. It has exceptionally high limits, but it doesn't force you to reach them to feel like you're having fun. If you never took an F12 to a track and just took it for spirited drives on back roads, you'd be happy for a lifetime. Of course, taking it to a track would impress you more, but the F12 is the rare supercar that can do without a race track and still make you feel like you have a connection with it.
When you want a normal car, that's exactly what it is. But when you want to go fast on a back road, it's as fun as anything out there. When you get it on a track, it'll be faster than nearly everything. It's one of the few cars that not only fills every niche, but is great at everything you ask it to do. Yes, it is very expensive. But it's actually worth the price.
Unless you want to use it as a tow vehicle. Then it might not be the best choice.
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