2024 Ferrari 12Cilindri review: It looks like a Daytona and feels like a Daytona

A while back, Max Girardo leant me his Daytona for a day and, yes, I know both that I’m a lucky chap and that it should really be called the Ferrari 365 GTB4, but we all know of which I speak. I drove it hard and I drove it fast and was transfixed by it. Which wasn’t by any means a given: I’d driven two before, one of which was terrible, the other really pretty good but quite a distance short of the mesmeric. What was different about this car? It was an early Plexiglas model that had been beautifully maintained but never restored so it was, I am sure, exactly how Ferrari always intended it to be.

The company has tried to recreate that magic on a couple of occasions since, first in 1995 with the 550 Maranello, then in 2013 with the F12 and pretty successfully so. But it has never drawn so deeply on the Daytona’s heritage as to actually style a car to look like a modern interpretation of Pininfarina’s sublime original shape. Until now.

On paper, the 12Cilindri appears to be a rebodied 812: a touch more power, a fraction less torque. A tiny increase in weight, but insufficient to change any of Ferrari’s claimed performance figures, which are all identical to those of the car it succeeds.

But to look at the 12Cilindri as simply an 812 dressed up in 1970s fancy dress is to mistake both the car and its purpose. Small suspension components (and large engine components) apart, it is a brand new car.

“It’s not a car that feels naturally at home on the circuit”

And it drives completely differently too. The V12 – probably the last of the F140 family that started life in the Enzo 22 years ago – now has a quieter voice, partly because of new drive-by regulations, partly because it fits the character of the car. Pull a paddle and ease away and you’ll be struck instantly by the car’s unreasonably fine ride quality. The interior is as luxurious as it is sporting, with pin-sharp instrument graphics and even a new central screen for infotainment functions. The steering wheel, however, is as needlessly overloaded as ever.

You gently glide down the road having a thoroughly nice time until something between your ears reminds you that’s not actually why you’re on board. So you find yourself some space and let rip.

At which point it will reveal exactly how much of any given car’s performance is, in fact, perception. I remember all the 812s I drove as being frantically and borderline manically fast at the top end of their extraordinarily wide rev-ranges. Almost, dare I say it, too much. Yet despite being no less potent and having driven the car for hours on the road and flung it around a test track as fast as I could make it go, I never got that sense from the 12Cilindri. It just felt gloriously rapid, without any of the histrionics that so enlivened progress in its predecessor.

For those thinking this sounds like Ferrari has gone soft, it’s important to stress this is still a car that will hit 62mph from rest in less than 3sec without the benefit of all-wheel drive. Wind the V12 up towards its incredible 9500rpm rev-limit and you’ll still be making mental notes to have that music played at your funeral. The difference is that, with this car, you can turn all that off too.

There are some downsides. It’s not a car that feels naturally at home on the circuit. With all that power and not a vast amount of grip from defiantly road-orientated rubber, it is, of course, simplicity itself to view the track ahead through the side windows, but this is not its natural state, which is instead an easily managed but determinedly understeering stance. Significantly, this is the first two-seat Ferrari in not just years but decades for which no official Fiorano lap time has been declared. Drive it and you’ll see why.

Also it would be much improved if you could divorce all the different systems that are affected by the drive mode you happen to be in. I think most owners would like the Race map for the engine because it provides the sharpest throttle response, but combined with the Sport setting for the transmission which allows shifts to be executed quickly but smoothly and not aggressively like they are in Race. But this facility, available in any number of small premium German sporting cars at a fraction of the cost, is not included here.

Even so, we should not let such niggles cloud the bigger truth. Which is that this is the most impressive and, to my mind, likeable attempt to create a thoroughly modern Daytona that there has been. It might not be how people remember them, but Daytonas were never terrifying, scarcely tameable beasts, but svelte, long-distance, ultra-high performance and distinctly sporting GTs. And now that the 1000bhp SF90 has far more power than any naturally aspirated V12 Ferrari road car engine has ever produced, and now that the Purosangue has moved Ferrari’s most practical offering into the four-door family car space, it makes sense for the 12Cilindri to move away from the former to take up a bit of the conceptual space vacated by the latter. And it does so quite brilliantly.

Ferrari 12Cilindri

• Price £336,500
• Engine 6.5 litres, 12 cylinders, petrol, naturally aspirated
• Power 819bhp at 9250rpm
• Torque 599lb ft at 7250rpm
• Weight 1685kg (DIN, estimated)
• Power to weight 486bhp per tonne
• Transmission Eight-speed double clutch, rear-wheel drive
• 0-60mph 2.0sec
• Top speed 211mph
• Economy 18.2mpg
• CO2 353g/km
• Verdict Daytona for the 21st century.