Matt Prior: Ferrari 812 Competizione is all about the details Car News

We all know ugly cars don’t stop them from selling well, but if you had the chance to make a nice car, why wouldn’t you?

Could I be bold enough to suggest that the new Competizione special edition of the Ferrari 812 Superfast is one of them? I like the general shape of this one, certainly more than I like the normal position of the 812 per se, but more than that, I find myself coming back to it to look at the details.

I love how the rear spoiler partially covers the taillights and the swoopy hood-strip-vent thing disappears into the fender tops and then seems to reappear at the bottom. These features add some intrigue without – to me, at least – appearing too difficult.

Ferrari’s design takes a while to evolve. It has model lines that persist for a while and then typically pass the architecture on to multiple model generations.

Flavio Manzoni became Ferrari’s design director in 2010, but he didn’t destroy it completely through fuel economy. had platforms whose evolution he oversaw for a very long time; but the Roma and that suggests that things are going well.

I’ll be interested to know, however, what this new 819 horsepower monster looks like. The extreme versions of mid-engined V8 Ferraris (the 458 Speciale, 488 Pista and so on) are brilliant but predictable in their philosophy. These are lighter, rawer versions of the original and notable rivals of the Porsche 911 GT3 RS.

But Ferrari has a habit of going off-road when it comes to extreme variations of its V12 sports car.

The 599 GTO was slightly closer to the Speciale way of doing things, but it wasn’t as tame as one of the V8s.

And the F12tdf was wild. Ferrari wanted massive agility so effectively tried putting rear tires up front and then, after realizing that this made it impossible to drive, added active rear steering to make it (slightly) less frantic. What about the engine? A Ferrari engineer told me he thought maybe it was too responsive; However, the best way to get more power from it will be to increase revs and therefore reactivity again.

Hope this new 812 Superfast is as consistent to drive as it is to look at. But I’ll appreciate the drama anyway.

By the time you read this, I will have been stung. Impinging on middle age means that I am in the group currently called. The good thing about it is that I will receive it at Bicester Heritage, the old airfield turned classic machine center near my home which has been converted into a Covid-19 vaccination center.