No miles whatsoever, because there is no EV mode. The petrol engine and electric motor work together every situation, hence the flower-wilting 330g/km of CO2. As Ferrari quite rightly asks, who in their right mind would want to buy a car that sounds this good, and then press the mute button and subtract 789bhp from the equation? You won’t find any kind of Fast and Furious-style push-to-pass boost button either, just an accelerator and Ferrari’s familiar manettino toggle on the steering wheel. The whole ethos of this car is to integrate the clever stuff into the traditional sports car experience, not make it centre stage.

But the most exciting bit of all is that Ferrari will use lessons learned on this project to help define the 458 replacement we should see next year. It’s going to be a monster.

A man named Roberto drives me in a Lancia Voyager minivan to a deserted parking lot at the bottom of a hill-climb that leads to the village of Samone. After waiting a few minutes, we hear the shriek of a high-revving V-12 engine before we see the car it’s powering: a red-and-black LaFerrari pulls up, the winged driver’s door rises, and an Italian journalist climbs out. It’s now my turn to drive the most anticipated Ferrari since the 2002 Enzo. No explanations, no admonitions. Just get in and go, Joe.

On the road: The ultimate sensory experience
Twist the red key, push the red start button, and the 6.3-liter V-12 instantly ignites. Foot on brake, pull the right-side carbon-fiber shift paddle, foot on gas, and we’re off. It’s raining, so I dial in wet mode, the most forgiving of the manettino switch’s driver settings. This road is a tight, bumpy, badly paved series of switchbacks, sluiced with gravel runoff. There’s no sound insulation, so I hear, always, the intoxicating rrrrappp of the V-12, the road debris hitting the underside of the car, the clicking of the shift paddles, the brake calipers on ceramic composite rotors, the rubber on the road. LaFerrari is the ultimate sensory experience.

The steering wheel, flat on both top and bottom, is small and transmits lots of information about the road. The familiar red start button is on the bottom left of the wheel, and the manettino switch used to select driving modes is on the bottom right. The steering is light in effort but precise. The front Pirellis are still cold and are crabbing in corners. When I dial in sport mode, the upshifts are a little quicker and the rear end of the car is a little more lively. The rears warm up, and it’s easy to oversteer. I’m hesitant to select race mode in these wet conditions. I last drove on this road in November 2009 in the then-new Ferrari 458 Italia, and I remember marveling at that car’s ability to pivot effortlessly into corners, but it’s pretty clear that LaFerrari takes that ability to a new level. If only the road were dry.

The sideview mirrors on carbon-fiber struts, a foot long, are equally cool-looking and practical. Speaking of practical, these Brembo brakes. On the short straights, I downshift, mash the accelerator, and hold on tight as the 345/30R-20 P Zeroes try to transmit a level of power and torque to the ground that is almost comical in these adverse conditions. The rear end of the car is having little of it. Damn this weather.

If you must go slow, take some time to appreciate your surroundings
Resigned to the conditions, I take a longer look at the cabin. It’s pretty austere, but the four round vents are nice to look at, and everything is obviously high-quality. Virtually everything you see and touch is polished carbon fiber accented with black Alcantara. Thin rubber floor mats provide a bit of traction for your feet, there’s a slim map pocket near the passenger’s kneecaps, and there’s a little rectangular tray for your phone, because if there’s one thing Italians will make room for, it’s a phone. The door panels are widely scooped out, making for plenty of outboard elbow room, and you’re also unlikely to rub elbows much with your passenger. In the center console, a carbon-fiber protrusion that looks like a grab handle has buttons to choose reverse gear, auto mode for the transmission, and launch control.

I abandon the hill-climb and head back to Maranello on meandering two-lane roads, following Roberto in the minivan. I have to say, he really knows how to drive that Voyager. Now there’s more spray from the rain, and the big single wiper sweeps efficiently over the huge windshield. The car isn’t quiet by any means, but I can carry on a conversation with my passenger. I glance up at the rear-view mirror and see the top of the engine cover, framed by the very sharply angled window, and just a little bit of the road behind. The rear-view camera image in the driver’s instrument cluster is crisp and clear. The A-pillars are close and not particularly tall, so the forward visibility is quite good. I can’t see the front corners of the car, but I have a very good sense of it.

Time to try automatic mode for the seven-speed dual-clutch gearbox. It’s flat-out wonderful and utterly benign; your mother could drive this car in automatic mode while sipping an espresso. Lovely throttle blipping on the automatic downshifts when you brake. It’s so easy to thread this car through roundabouts and villages.

We arrive at Pista di Fiorano. You think we had any problem getting the gates to open for us in our LaFerrari? Back in Roberto’s minivan for a ride to lunch at Il Cavallino, the famous restaurant adjacent to the Ferrari campus. The engineering team, who gave us a technical briefing last night, is there to finish telling the story of the development of LaFerrari, Ferrari’s first-ever hybrid automobile.

Efficiency of performance
LaFerrari is no tree-hugging exercise with a prancing horse badge. This is a real Ferrari, the most powerful roadgoing Ferrari ever built and, surely, one of the most desirable. While the word “efficiency” is in every other sentence that comes out of the mouths of Ferrari engineers, they’re talking about efficiency of performance far more than they’re talking about fuel efficiency or emissions.

Ferrari began working on hybrid KERS (kinetic energy recovery system) powertrains in 2008 for its Formula 1 Scuderia’s racing efforts. A Ferrari 599-based concept car slathered with fluorescent green paint and fitted with a HY-KERS powertrain debuted at the 2010 Geneva motor show, and development of the LaFerrari began shortly thereafter. In addition to its tightly packaged mechanical layout, which encompasses a V-12 hybrid powertrain in the same wheelbase and overall length as the 2002 Ferrari Enzo, LaFerrari’s claim to technical fame is its highly advanced use of carbon fiber for the car’s chassis-tub structure and body panels, made possible by hand-applied, time-intensive, proprietary techniques that are also a direct trickle-down from Ferrari’s racing development.

All carbon fiber is not created equal
Ferrari strongly feels that all carbon fiber is not created equal. Many of the latest carbon-fiber cars, including highly respected machines from the likes of McLaren, Porsche, BMW, and Lamborghini, use RTM (resin-transfer molding) carbon fiber, but Ferrari isn’t impressed.

“With RTM, you don’t get any better weight reduction than we already achieve with our advanced aluminum technologies,” says Franco Cimatti, the Italian-born, American-educated Ferrari veteran engineer who’s in charge of vehicle concepts and pre-development.

For LaFerrari’s chassis tub and body panels, Ferrari prefers pre-preg carbon fiber, which is pre-impregnated with resin before it’s sent into the same huge autoclaves that bake up all the pieces for the F1 race cars. “With pre-preg, we are taking a lot less resin for the ride,” quips Cimatti, “because our autoclave techniques allow us to squeeze out excess resin during the baking.” A particular type of extra-high-strength carbon fiber referred to as T1000 is used both in the F1 race cars’ nose cones and in the structure of the LaFerrari’s doors for crash protection. T800 UD refers to a type of unidirectional carbon fiber that Ferrari carefully places in the same direction as principal loads in key sections of the car’s structure.

In the end, the LaFerrari’s chassis tub and roof, which are bonded together with resins and mechanical fasteners, weigh all of 176 pounds and provide 27 percent more torsional rigidity and 22 percent more bending stiffness than the carbon-fiber structure of the Ferrari Enzo.

A user-friendly supercar
Ah, yes, the Enzo. It’s a constant reference point for LaFerrari engineers, so I ask Matteo Lanzavecchia, who’s in charge of vehicle performance and who once spent a year working for Newman/Haas Racing’s IndyCar program, what an Enzo owner might experience if he or she gets behind the wheel of a LaFerrari.

“If you drive an Enzo and you drive this car, if you are in the same gear, you will have double the level of acceleration,” he says without hesitation. “And you will reach it in one-third the time when you go on the throttle. You will also feel how easy and how safe it is to push the car to the limit. LaFerrari also requires 45 percent less steering activity [input] than the Enzo did, which makes it much easier to control coming out of corners.”

On a more elemental but perhaps more important level, LaFerrari is easier to climb into and out of than the Enzo was, or than most other supercars are. You see, many of the multimillionaires who can and do buy cars like these are not as petite as, say, Ferrari test driver Raffaele De Simone, a typically compact, trim Italian racer. The path to making the LaFerrari more user-friendly started, like everything else on this car, with its carbon-fiber construction, specifically that of the X-shaped roof, which provides enough rigidity to allow for huge door cutouts.

“The sills swell as they go rearward,” Cimatti points out, “our doors are hinged from above, and we have no conventional door posts to get in the way.” The result is a surprisingly large aperture into which you can thread your body quite easily. Indeed, I climbed into and out of our LaFerrari test car at least twenty times during our test-drive day, and it was by far the easiest ingress/egress I’ve ever experienced in a supercar. The doors are easy to open and close from both inside and outside of the car.

Packaging efficiency and a lower center of gravity
Although LaFerrari does not require its occupants to have the size and flexibility of F1 racing drivers, their perches inside the cabin, Cimatti explains, are “inspired by the reclined posture of F1 drivers, which allows for space efficiency.” He elaborates: “We wanted to have cabin space that’s similar to the Enzo’s, but with room for helmets. We experimented with how far we could recline the seating position and eventually arrived at an additional seven degrees of seatback tilt. Anything more than that would create undue pressure on the necks of occupants.” Nevertheless, the change in seat position and the lack of a separate seat structure gained Ferrari engineers 2.4 inches of vertical cabin space (for helmets), even while the vehicle’s overall height has been reduced by 1.2 inches.

Crucially, the highly efficient use of cabin space also allowed Ferrari to lower the LaFerrari’s center of gravity by 1.4 inches as compared with, you guessed it, the Enzo. “This is a massive number,” Cimatti boasts. “In F1, we will completely redesign a car just to lower the center of gravity by a few millimeters.” LaFerrari’s center of gravity, at 14.8 inches above the ground, is also some 2.6 inches lower than the 458 Italia’s. Given the lack of a separate seat structure and the thinness of the seat bottom, this means your butt is perched about as low to the ground as it can go. Small, medium, large, and custom-size seats are offered, so a range of girths, if not extreme heights, of buyers can be accommodated. Our test car is equipped with size large perches, but they don’t feel overly large.

Lunch is over and we’re back at Fiorano, in the pit garage. My LaFerrari has been cleaned and shined, and its doors are soaring toward the ceiling. Noticing the big bulge of carbon fiber between the seatbacks, I ask Cimatti if he couldn’t have wedged in a little storage compartment. “That’s the fuel tank,” he replies with a grin. “It curves behind and between the seats. This is what I meant when I said [the previous evening] that there is a difference between ‘interior space’ and ‘the space needed for driving.’ ” By the same token, passenger footroom is reduced due to the fact that the air-conditioning unit is mounted just in front of the footwell, which helps keep the dashboard low.

Indeed, every square millimeter has been accounted for, says project manager Michele Giaramita, leaving room for only the tiniest of cargo compartments, some 40 liters in capacity, in front of the firewall and behind the front radiators, whose fans are visible through slots in the hood. This is not a car for road trips, but you could wedge a handbag and a jacket in there.

“Let’s go for a ride.”
Ferrari test driver Raffaele De Simone climbs into the driver’s seat and, pointing to the passenger’s seat, says, “Let’s go for a ride.” The seats are fixed in place, but the steering wheel and pedals are adjustable. Racing harnesses secured, we burst out onto the circuit, De Simone providing a running commentary, which I find impressive not only because English is not his first language, but also because he’s driving the ***** off this car in a steady rain. Even with his skilled hands and feet, though, the rear tires are sometimes clawing for traction.

“All this technology has a physical output that speaks to the driver in a very natural way. Even in these difficult conditions you feel that you are driving the car, you are managing the power, and the behavior of the car is always giving feedback.” Reflecting on the extremely wet track, he continues: “When the mechanical grip is low, the aerodynamics makes a lot of work. So you have to trust a little bit. So even on a day like this, you can drive your LaFerrari.” Indeed.

The feedback I’m hearing is the mechanical sound of the big rear wing deploying under hard braking, at the same time as two rear flaps that are integrated into the rear diffuser. There are also three automatically deploying aerodynamic flaps under the front of the car, but they’re not visible or audible. There are, of course, all manner of sophisticated aerodynamic manipulations happening with LaFerrari, starting with a frontal area that’s ten percent less than the 458 Italia’s. The thing is, it’s all achieved subtly, without garish wings, in a rather svelte body profile.

Behind the wheel at Fiorano: Always, the V-12.
De Simone pulls back into the garage. “I would say sport and wet today are the best for you,” he gently advises, then steps out of the car. I’m on my own. I cautiously enter the circuit and head toward Turn 1, a tight right-hander. The V-12 sounds awesome. It’s pouring rain now, so, yeah, wet mode for sure.

With a big burst of speed coming out of third gear, Enzo’s house is visible out of the corner of my right eye. I brake hard, downshift to second for the uphill of Turn 4 and the bumpy, tricky approach to the bridge. I often screw this up, because you want to get some speed up to get over it, but then you have the immediate hard right of Turn 5. I’m still contemplating that challenge when another one arises: a big pool of water. I hydroplane into a runoff area on the left but gather it back up (with the able assistance of the electronics) and swivel gently through the tight lefthander that is Turn 6. More standing water, and I can feel the rear tires clawing for traction as the V-12 angrily tries to tell them who’s boss. Hard braking for some acceleration toward the gentle swell of Turn 7. This is the moment when you feel like you’re aiming right toward the big ceramics factory, smoke billowing from its chimneys, which borders this side of the track. But you’re not. At least, I’m not.

At the end of the straight is a tight left toward the last corner, Turn 8, a fairly broad but slow loop, and the apartment building is hard on the right. Every time I’m at Fiorano, I wonder, who in the world lives there, with a bird’s-eye view of Fiorano? A blessing for some, a curse for others, I imagine.

Now onto the straight, the paddock on the right, and the V-12 sounds so, so amazing, brapp brapp, brapp. The sound of a Ferrari V-12: nothing like it, and nothing is muffling it here, trust me. Electric motor? I have no clue. I don’t hear it.

Now, just the slightest movement of the steering wheel to the left to enter Turn 1 from the correct angle. Braking blipping blipping blipping click clack click of the paddle shifters. Always, the V-12. And the single wiper blade, furiously sweeping.

Specs, pricing, impressions and photos -- what more could you want?

What is it?

Well, it's "The" Ferrari. Ferrari president Luca di Montezemolo called it "... the maximum expression of what defines our company," which is obviously a pretty bold statement. It's also the latest in a long line of ultra-exclusive instant collectibles that started with the 288 GTO and ran through the F40, F50 and Enzo. It's also Ferrari's first hybrid road car.

Ferrari will only build 499 of them and they've all been sold to Ferrari's very favorite clients. It's not going to be a volume leader, but as a technological test bed, brand-burnisher and expression of Ferrari's considerable technical prowess, it's invaluable.

It's powered by a 788-hp, 6.3-liter V12 that will be familiar to fans of the company's F12berlinetta, only in this application it's tuned to make power way up high in the rev-range -- redline is at 9,250 rpm. Ferrari was able to tune the engine that way because there's an electric motor providing instant low-end torque and bringing total power up to 950 hp and 663 lb-ft of torque.

The car actually has two electric motors. One sends 163 hp to the driven wheels and sometimes generates electricity, while the other powers the car's ancillary electric system and sometimes generates electricity. Ferrari designed and manufactured its own battery. It weighs just 132 pounds and is integrated into the chassis.

Porsche's 918 and McLaren's P1 are both plug-in hybrids and both have limited all-electric range. Ferrari's battery is smaller than those in the McLaren and the Porsche, and Ferrari has included very limited all-electric capability at the request of some customers.

We're told it's technically possible to plug in the LaFerrari, but that's not really how it's intended to be used, and there's no visible plug-in port on the outside of the car.

The interior is about as sparse as it gets, with leather, carbon fiber, aluminum and Alcantara covering almost everything you can touch or see. There's a decent navigation system integrated into the gauge cluster, and the A/C works. From the driver's seat, the view is not unlike that of a 458.

When Ferrari explained that the seats were not actually seats, but custom upholstered impressions in the car's carbon-fiber tub, we were skeptical. An engineer showed us a diagram with a couple of guys kind of leaning back in the LaFerrari's cockpit and a bunch of dotted lines intersecting their hips and heads. Still skeptical. We learned that the seats and pedal assembly telescope to meet the driver. Still skeptical. After some significant seat time, we're happy to report that it worked for us (large), a well-known U.K. journalist (medium) and a couple of Ferrari factory drivers (small).

The seating arrangement also provides incredible feedback (since your back and *** are almost touching the chassis) and it allows for a low roof that leaves the driver room to wear a helmet.

The car is also specifically designed to be easy to get into and out of, which will surely be appreciated by drivers who are old-ish and/or portly-ish.Once you're in, there's a surprising amount of room. If there was nothing but a milk crate and some rusty bailing wire where the seats should be, people would still line up to drive this car. But fortunately, LaFerraris will be delivered in road-trip ready spec -- provided the road trip doesn't require a lot of luggage.

What's it like to drive?

It's otherworldly. It's explosive. It's unlike anything else.

On Fiorano, you're trying to look as far ahead as possible. Even if you've driven some fast cars on strange racetracks before, the pace at which the car catches up to where you're looking takes a good deal of getting used to.

But other than that, it's nowhere near as difficult to drive as the spec sheet would suggest. It's as well balanced as its 41/59 weight distribution would suggest. The steering is communicative and easy to manage. The chassis is stiff, though the ride is surprisingly compliant. The fact that the seat is part of the chassis provides the driver with a good deal of useful information about where the car's weight is and where it would like to be. When you run into some loose gravel, you can hear and feel it being thrown against the underside of the chassis. The wealth of tangible information that the car presented us with went a long way toward building our trust and confidence in it.

Well-insured, brave drivers will have no problem easing the car into and out of a great, showy drift. Though, it should be noted that one of our fellow journalists said that midpower-slide corrective throttle inputs should be undertaken with caution, as the results can be hard to predict at first. Since we were standing on a winding, narrow mountain road watching a cyclist round a downhill hairpin while avoiding a box truck, we decided to take his word for it and switched the Manettino dial from the off position to the "Have fun, I'll be right here to save your bacon when you screw up" setting.

On the track, the power and the sound it makes on its way to the rear wheels is invigorating; but what's amazing, what is shocking, is the grip. Ferrari has the reactive-differential game and the traction-control game on lock. You don't notice any of the systems until you overcook a corner, but end up getting through it pretty quickly in spite of yourself.

Ferrari also equipped the car with an impressive, automated active aerodynamic system that works in concert with the rest of the car to manage downforce and drag to your benefit.

The factory shoes ripped around the track at mind-bending speeds without breaking a sweat. A couple of the braver journalists did some drifting. We turned lap after lap, prodding the car, trying to understand how a car so complex could be so genuinely fun to drive. It's remarkable there, too: Pretty much any driver could get into a 950-hp Ferrari, hit the track and not only survive, but experience speed-related sensations that were, in the past, available to just a handful of the world's best drivers.

Do I want it: Yeah. I do. There's so much more to be said about this car, and we'll be diving into the details in a series of posts and articles in the coming week. But as you've probably gathered, the LaFerrari is a uniquely special machine.

Base Price: Around $1.4 million (sold out)

Drivetrain: 6.3-liter, 950-hp, 663-lb-ft V12; electric motor, RWD, seven-speed dual-clutch automated manual

Curb Weight: 3,108 lb (wet)

0-60 MPH: Under 3 sec

The LaFerrari is definitely *the* Ferrari.

The night I was scheduled to leave for Maranello, Italy, to drive the LaFerrari, Car and Driver hosted a party in New York for the annual auto show. The guests of honor included three racing heroes you’d recognize from the Kodachromes: David Hobbs, Sam Posey, and Brian Redman. These gents hail from the golden age of motorsports, when every race weekend seemed to darken into an orgy of gore and fire.

I apologized in advance to Redman for having to leave the party early. I told him that duty called, and that I was off to drive this $1.35 million road dart, the latest in a line of rolling-laboratory supercars stretching back through the Enzo, F50, F40, and 288GTO. I also confessed that I was slightly terrified to tangle with the thing. He sized me up and said, “You should be.”

I’ve driven cars that have tried to kill me before, but none with such a vast résumé of homicidal know-how. Some have threatened to slide off the road without warning, some have tried to collapse my organs with g-force, and some have ached to impale me on their sharp interior surfaces. This one does it all. There is a video of Kimi Räikkönen, Ferrari’s F1 driver and a racer of almost Mario Andretti–like versatility, driving the LaFerrari (the TheFerrari?) at the brand’s Fiorano test track. There are flames spitting out of the car’s exhaust pipes. Deafening shrieks. Imminent loss of control at every corner. And then, finally, a lurid, frame-filling spin onto the grass. If Räikkönen couldn’t corral the surrealistic bestiality packed into this car’s short wheelbase, what hope did I, someone who has never even been to Finland, really have?

The night I was scheduled to leave for Maranello, Italy, to drive the LaFerrari, Car and Driver hosted a party in New York for the annual auto show. The guests of honor included three racing heroes you’d recognize from the Kodachromes: David Hobbs, Sam Posey, and Brian Redman. These gents hail from the golden age of motorsports, when every race weekend seemed to darken into an orgy of gore and fire.

I apologized in advance to Redman for having to leave the party early. I told him that duty called, and that I was off to drive this $1.35 million road dart, the latest in a line of rolling-laboratory supercars stretching back through the Enzo, F50, F40, and 288GTO. I also confessed that I was slightly terrified to tangle with the thing. He sized me up and said, “You should be.”

I’ve driven cars that have tried to kill me before, but none with such a vast résumé of homicidal know-how. Some have threatened to slide off the road without warning, some have tried to collapse my organs with g-force, and some have ached to impale me on their sharp interior surfaces. This one does it all. There is a video of Kimi Räikkönen, Ferrari’s F1 driver and a racer of almost Mario Andretti–like versatility, driving the LaFerrari (the TheFerrari?) at the brand’s Fiorano test track. There are flames spitting out of the car’s exhaust pipes. Deafening shrieks. Imminent loss of control at every corner. And then, finally, a lurid, frame-filling spin onto the grass. If Räikkönen couldn’t corral the surrealistic bestiality packed into this car’s short wheelbase, what hope did I, someone who has never even been to Finland, really have?

The LaFerrari uses its stupid name as a feint, belittling a specification that is as serious as an Apollo mission. Its 950-hp hybrid powertrain shames Ferrari’s F14 T F1 car by 200 or so horses (actual F1 power figures are undisclosed). Its center of gravity is 1.4 inches lower than even the Enzo’s, and it uses a carbon-fiber monocoque baked in the same autoclaves as are Ferrari’s F1 cars. At speed, its aerodynamics provide the car with one gorilla of downforce (800 pounds). The brakes are cross-drilled and radially vented carbon ceramic discs the size of pizza pans.

There are more powerful cars out there, cars with more downforce, and cars with even bigger and blacker brakes. But the LaFerrari represents a singularity. It is less a conventional supercar than a carefully orchestrated system of technologies resulting in something both brutally animalistic and mechanically pristine.

Architecture, Powertrain, and Aerodynamics

We are in Ferrari’s F1 shop, where Franco Cimatti, the head of road-car development, is backdropped by four huge autoclaves, big brewery-vat-looking things laid on their sides. This is where the LaFerrari’s carbon-fiber tub gets baked, right alongside the racing cars’. Cimatti, thin, with close-cropped hair and wire-rimmed glasses, intones, “If you get the physics right, everything else falls into place. A low center of gravity is key.”

He planned the car’s architecture around its seating position. His original idea was to lay the driver down into an almost F1-like recumbency, legs up and seatback at chaise angle, but found that 32 degrees is as far as you can recline a non-F1-driving human before his front neck muscles compress and his breathing becomes strained. Still, he got the driver 2.4 inches lower than in the Enzo by easing him back and removing the seat, separating the driver’s rear from the tub with just an Alcantara-swathed pad. Without a seat’s springs and compliance, there is no filter to muffle chassis feedback.

Without a seat, though, it would have been kind of awkward and somewhat humiliating to get into and out of the car. So Ferrari cut away the sills and integrated them into the doors, hinging the now large, deep wings off the top of the A-pillar, endurance-car style. The arrowhead-shaped tub has the added effect of reducing frontal area for less drag; open those big doors, and the exposed front wheels almost look as if they were seceding from the body.

The basic slipperiness and lift inherent in the shape led to an active-aero solution to keep the LaFerrari stuck to the road. All its wings and flaps are hidden when the car is parked, but they are one of the most obvious things about it in motion. Front and rear undercar panels are always moving from a low-drag (flat) to high-drag (folded into the slipstream) position as they manage downforce. And a wide fluke at the back is constantly changing pitch and height, rising out from underneath the trailing edge of the engine cover. At 125 mph, downforce ranges from 200 pounds in the low-drag settings to an astounding 800 pounds with all the flaps and wings reaching away from the body, radically upping the car’s stability and adhesion limit.

Part of the aero package is passive, too—there are channels in the shape that help air remain attached to the body while funneling flow through the cooling system. And indeed, the LaFerrari needs all the cooling it can get. Here are the main elements of the so-called HY-KERS (Hybrid Kinetic-Energy Recovery System) powertrain: a 6.3-liter, 789-hp V-12 with variable-length intake runners, a 13.5:1 compression ratio, and a 9250-rpm redline to match; an oil-cooled, 161-hp electric motor hung off the back of the seven-speed dual-clutch automatic; and a low-set, refrigerated Li-ion battery pack that acts as a structural element at the rear of the passenger compartment. Total system output is a claimed 950 horsepower, and it’s all orchestrated to highlight each element’s strength. It calls on the electric motor’s instantaneous response to provide a kind of boost and fill in the screaming V-12’s lower rev range. The result is a compound powertrain with shockingly smooth and direct response; if you’re holding fourth gear and mash the throttle, you’ll swear you are in second.

The car is technically a plug-in hybrid. There is no pure EV setting on the steering-wheel-mounted manettino switch just yet, but later cars will offer drivers the guilt-assuaging luxury of puttering up to 5 miles on battery juice alone.

The LaFerrari will have a limited run of 499 units, so it is not a concept car. But it is highly conceptual: hybrid system for more torque, aero for elevated limits, and driver sitting on the bottom of the tub for a more direct connection with the machine. It should not surprise you to learn that Cimatti, the car’s mastermind, builds his own titanium road bikes that use the rear of the frame as a springing element.

The Drive

I first climbed into the car in the “Box”—the Formula 1 test and telemetry garage at Fiorano, which lies across the street from the factory. Inside, the car almost looks like a tactical aircraft. Everything is exposed carbon fiber with just a few Alcantara accents, and there are lots of pod-mounted buttons whose functions are almost entirely obscure. With the fullness of time, you can learn the ways in which the menu buttons and four-position switches—one set at each of the driver’s hands—control the glass-cockpit instrumentation. But this is not recommended at speed.

Fire up the LaFerrari, and you can actually feel the barometric pressure change as the car clears its throat and then, at ignition, makes the sound of 100 pounds of nails hitting concrete. The driving position doesn’t feel that extreme, mostly because the squared-off steering wheel is very big and well placed, but also because the pedals slide up to meet your legs.

I was told I would get three laps—one warm-up, one hot, one cool-down—street value somewhere in the five figures. But it was hardly enough time to get comfortably up to speed in the car. What I interpreted was a kind of relentless brutality and directness. The powertrain responds like an electric motor but sounds like a big, brassy V-12. Somehow, the hybrid system preserves the engine’s inherent smoothness; it just adds more—more low-end torque, more linearity, more clearance to redline. You are never out of the power band. Part-throttle on/off reflexes are hair trigger. You almost have to adjust to all of this, and once you do, no car will ever feel truly head-hurtingly quick again.

I couldn’t hear the aero elements moving under the rawp of the engine, but I could feel their effects. The car is unerringly stable in a straight line under hard throttle. Braking zones feel usefully shortened, thanks to the big rear wing. In corners, you have to be going fast enough to make it stick, and a couple of times I got on the throttle too fast and felt the back end come around, flushing my nervous system with adrenaline, making my fingers tingle. It’s hard not to worry about spinning the LaFerrari when you’ve seen an F1 driver do so, but it’s more likely he had all the electronic traction helpers off and not on their penultimate “CT off” manettino setting, which allows some side slip before reining in the car. The application of this car to that track made the former seem big and hairy and the latter seem small and insanely technical. Then it was over.

Thankfully, we were allowed some time with the car on the road. We took it into the tight, undulating hills outside Maranello. There, the car magically started to shrink. The steering is odd in that it returns absolutely zero road feel; the electrically assisted power steering numbs out any hint of street surface, even big blemishes. But it is nevertheless some of the best steering I’ve ever encountered—unfailingly direct, noiseless, and linear. The lack of road texture filtering up almost doesn’t matter because you’re getting so much information from the rest the chassis, which you’re sitting on almost as you would a motorcycle. Or, as Cimatti said, “In this car, you are the inertial mass.”

Its ride and handling balance favors both. The car seems to float over bumps. Its suspension system is an evolution of the 458 Italia’s, with double wishbones in front and a thicket of links in back. What makes its over-the-road suppleness even more amazing is that it doesn’t have the 458’s real-time adjustable magnetorheological dampers. It just has these very cool, two-mode (normal and “bumpy road”) Öhlins coil-overs, which are expensive but not necessarily cutting edge. The LaFerrari feels softer than the 458, like it’s running less spring, but at times it also feels like a 458 with nine *********.

On these rising, heavily kinked roads, the car shows off its abundant front-end grip, as though it were extending a fat, sharp claw toward the corner’s apex. And turn-in is uncannily flat, immediate, and crisp; the LaFerrari pivots more than handles.

The brakes reveal a bit of a stepped transition from energy regeneration to friction as you modulate them, but, hey, nothing’s perfect.

What Ferrari has created here is something as cerebral as it is brutal, the Hannibal Lecter of supercars, the Richard Sherman of—sorry. I’m stretching.

Martin Mull once said that writing about music was like dancing about architecture, that there was no way to capture on paper a great performance’s sweep, its pulse, its emotional effect. We might have reached the point where cars are getting so outrageously fast and so deliriously powerful that they outstrip our ability to invent new ways of describing them. In some ways, writing about the LaFerrari is like playing poker about salad. It’s something that can’t be bound by the page; it’s a full-body experience. And yes, Mr. Redman, I survived it.

In this video you can see the all new Ferrari LaFerrari on the road in Monaco! It's awesome to see one in real life and it looks way better than I've been expected.

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A red Ferrari LaFerrari was caught on camera while doing a few laps on track. A new YouTube video by the JEWETHE team shows us the Italian hypercar in action producing some nice exhaust sounds.

The LaFerrari has a combined output of 963 PS (708 kW) that comes from an 800 HP (588 kW) V12 petrol unit and a 163 HP (120 kW) electric motor. Thanks to its light construction, the car does the 0-100 km/h (0-62 mph) sprint in less than three seconds. Top speed is rated at more than 350 km/h (217 mph).