Ferrari 599 GTB Fiorano

I didn’t grow up lusting after Ferraris. My passion was Aston Martin. Maybe it was James Bond. But I’m pretty sure it was nothing more than the fact that, in my eyes, Aston Martins were quite simply the most beautiful cars on the planet. They still are. And if a wanted a poster for my bedroom it would in all probability be a Lamborghini. The Countach. An extreme machine which probably appealed at the time because it looked like it had been designed by a hormone-fuelled teenager.

So I have never really lusted after a Ferrari. Admired certainly, coveted even. I always found them slightly less than masculine. I know, I am very much in the minority. But there was one exception. The Ferrari Daytona. Now that looked how a high-performance car should. It was purposeful. You knew just from looking that it would fulfil your dreams. Well, now there’s another.

The Ferrari 599 GTB Fiorano. A true front-engined V12 Ferrari sporting GT in the old-fashioned mould. A huge improvement over the 575, which never really did it for me, either visually or to drive. But Ferrari have fixed that.

I wrote about the Porsche 911 Turbo recently, a car that I said was as quick as anything in the real world, its all-round ability making it untouchable. Well, if you factor in reliability and everyday usability, I stand by that. But the Ferrari 599 actually makes the 911 seem slow. This is SLR territory. This must be the fastest Ferrari I have ever driven. Its straight line speed is simply astonishing. Never mind 0-60, its 0-100 time is sub 7.5 seconds! Now that is seriously quick. It is in SLR, Koenigsegg and Zonda territory. But it’s less than £200k. A veritable bargain.

The 599 is very stiff, and uses magnetic suspension for instant reaction (similar to Audi in the R8). The F1 ‘box gets supershift technology, which makes changes lightening fast. It really does think so quickly it’s almost doing it before you’ve decided what you want. But it only seems to work really well when you’re going hell for leather. More modest acceleration, and downchanges, are a bit disappointing. And I couldn’t find a suspension setting I was really happy with. I’m not sure the Maranello engineers had UK roads in mind when they mapped it. But These are little niggles. This is an absolutely awesome car, offering class destroying performance at, lets face it, bargain prices when you compare it to the likes of an SLR or Zonda.

And we have a Ferrari 599 GTB Fiorano for sale (build slot Q3 2008). Which has got to be an improvement on the 3 years Ferrari now make you wait. Well, perhaps I should re-phrase that, because I recently had an email discussion with a guy who took me to task for not updating the site when we sell cars. In my defence, I told him that I felt these posts were in effect news pages (which is what a blog is about). I believed that people would realise that it meant we have a car for sale at this point. So I want to make it clear that what we actually have is not a Ferrari 599 for sale, but a changeable build slot for a Ferrari 599 (3rd quarter 2008) as of today’s date. It may well be gone by tomorrow, and almost certainly within the week. But if you are reading this at some point in the future, I’m sure we’ll be able to get you what you want. Just not this particular one!