EDITOR-IN-CHIEF CHARLIE TURNER HAS JUST TEXTED ME A SELFIE,
and it’s made me more than a little excited. I’ll just point out that it’s because he is standing in front of a McLaren P1 and inviting me to join him. Even better, motoring editor Ollie Marriage has responded with a similar photo clutching the key to a Porsche 918. Neither of them is far away. You’d think that might be enough, but TG mag has already pitted the 918 and P1 against one other, and in the Great Hypercar Showdown there has been a glaring omission. It means that these digital snaps are big news. I compose my response and send it with a location of where to rendezvous on a fabulous, wriggle-strewn road in the Italian hills above a little town called Maranello. I’m smiling, too. The backdrop of my shot is LaFerrari. Time to dance.
That’s it. Tom has the fnal piece of TopGear’s biggest-ever horsepower puzzle, and I’m still pinching myself that we’ve managed to make this happen. I’ve been working on this for months, and to actually be here with the team about to drive the three most technologically advanced cars on the planet, on sublime roads, is the stuf the dreams are made of. And this is an ofcial test: all the manufacturers know what we’re up to, all three were prepared to ofer factory cars, confdent in their machines. That they chose to lend them all to TopGear magazine frst is a huge privilege. But it’s not a free pass. We at TG are beholden to no one – if there’s a bad car or a winner, we will say so. That said, it’s great to be back in the P1, a car I loved from the frst time we tested it. And luckily, there’s 40 miles of road to fund a re-edit of my opinions before we get down to the three-car shenanigans.
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Getting these three together is the test we’ve wanted to make happen ever since we learned that Porsche, McLaren and Ferrari were all working on hybrid hypercars. And now, four or fve years and roughly a million phone calls, meetings and arm-twistings later, it’s the ping of text messages that reveals it’s fnally happening. Sitting in the 918 Spyder, I’m properly optimistic – I know, it’s tempting to see the 918 as an underdog, a poor relation. It’s from a more mainstream frm that
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doesn’t have F1 roots. They’re building more of them. It’s cheaper, and with the biggest battery and smallest CO2 emissions, the most overtly hybrid. And so on. If nothing else, this morning has already revealed the complete nonsense of that viewpoint. The Porsche is just as hyper, just as ferocious as the others. I’m intrigued to fnd out how it compares to the LaFerrari, utterly intrigued. And completely overexcited. The only stipulation was no track work (basically no lap times), but I’m not fussed about that right now – I can’t wait to see them all together, to have all three yowling up an Italian hillside. This is an unbelievable privilege.
With the other two cars on the way, it’s time to get this LaFerrari moving. As Ollie said, we’re not allowed to track-test these three, but Ferrari allowed me a few laps of its Fiorano test circuit for reference so that I could fully deploy the LaFerrari’s 950bhp without fear of immediate prison time. What those minutes reveal is that this will be possibly the greatest three-car test in modern history. At full stretch, the LaFerrari is ferociously accelerative, eerily stable and brakes like a shove to the shoulders. In the right mode – in my case, Race – the guidance systems also allow me to feel like a hero without actually needing to be a legend. And this thing howls. A brittle V12 soprano with the kind of throttle response that feels like witchcraft. Which it is, of a modern sort. But this isn’t a circuit test. And with that in mind, I’m kicked of Ferrari’s hallowed ground and drive carefully out of town to meet the others.
The LaFerrari turns out to be an easy companion. You almost forget you’re driving the apogee of Ferrari’s road-car programme, as long as you ignore pedestrians walking into lamp posts and small children hauling their mothers to a dead stop in a whiplash of wonder. And when we fnally get out of town and onto the long, sweeping Italian A-roads, the LaFerrari accelerates up the road like a thrown punch. That 161bhp of electrical urge? It’s just there to slice open the bottom of the torque curve of the V12 and stuf it with the throttle response of the gods. No wait, no lag, just endless, soul-bufeting acceleration and noise.
It’s a bizarre feeling, this speed of reaction. A simple V12 has never fared to input like this, but the electric KERS-alike power doesn’t feel unnatural. And the steering is ultra-sharp, almost disturbingly so, ficking the car rather than steering it, at least for the frst few miles. There is a whif of body roll, instructive and intended, and the brakes are ridiculous. There is also one of the most spectacular front ends on any road car I’ve driven, apart from, unsurprisingly, a 458 Speciale – on a dry road, LaFerrari will stick where you think it will slip, eke grip where you think it will falter. And you can use the power. Not all of it all of the time, but get it right, and this is a car to end all things.
A bare 40 miles later, with the million-pound Ferrari ticking its heat away in a wide Italian lay-by on the bottom of a hairpin-infected back road, I’m
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