Driving a Ferrari for the very first time | Frankel’s Insight

From it ending Alfa Romeo’s dominance in Formula 1 in the very early 1950s to the 2024 season when it battled Red Bull and McLaren, coming within a few seconds of carrying off that year’s Constructor’s Championship.

In the intervening lifetime? More than I care to count, but those that spring most instantly to mind include John Surtees coming from nowhere to claim the 1964 title from the British garagistas, the 330 P4 vs. Ford GT40 battles at Le Mans in the ‘60s, the 512S and Porsche 917 battles in the ‘70s, Hunt vs. Lauda and even the intra-team battles such a Villeneuve and Pironi.

But what is it about this company, and what is it like to sample one of its products for the very first time? I was incredibly lucky to do so aged just 19. It was my father’s car and far and away the least exciting Ferrari money could buy — a Mondial. He wanted a 308, of course, but the presence of my little sister paid to that. But at least it was a ‘qv’, the version fitted with four valves per cylinder, so its V8 engine put out 243PS (179kW), not the rather anaemic 217PS (160kW) of the original.

It lived in France, in a lock-up a few hundred yards from the cottage that he kept there to preserve his sanity while living in Jersey which, even then, had a maximum island speed limit of 40mph. We were both at the cottage one day and he just leaned over and said: “would you mind getting the car please? Try not to be more than an hour.” I saw the faintest smile on his lips as he so effortlessly, so casually fulfilled one of my lifetime dreams.

I’d never known when that moment might come, but it hadn’t stopped me spending years wondering what I might do when it did. Drive like Tom Cruise in father’s Porsche in Risky Business, or like Miss Daisy on the chauffeur’s day off because if I damaged it, or got into trouble in it, that would be not only the first time I drove a Ferrari, but the last?

I elected for the middle ground. I was going to see, not how quickly or slowly I could drive this car, but how well.

Of course I knew the location and function of every control, for I’d already spent hours behind its wheel without turning the key. So, I fired up the quad cam V8 (if only I could tell you what those words meant to a teenage me), eased out onto the road and changed at once into third. The fact you never used a Ferrari’s second gear until the transmission oil was warm was more hardwired into my brain than the need to brush my teeth.

Finally the moment came. A long straight, the deliberate slowing, the selection of the now permissible second gear, foot down, revs all the way around to 7,700rpm, howling, shrieking and, er, is that it? Even then, I must report it felt none too fast.

It didn’t matter. I was driving a Ferrari. I trundled slowly through a few villages, watching for reactions from people sat outside roadside cafés, desperate for a wave, clap, cheer or similar. But there was nothing, the Bretons at their phlegmatic best. But at least no one shook their fists at me.

A little further on came the combination of corners I knew so well, as I took them flat out every morning on the baguette run in the one car I was allowed to drive: our dilapidated 2CV. Not knowing what was a safe speed, I went through at a pace that would have had the old Citroën on its door handles and marvelled at how flat the Ferrari remained, the accuracy of its quite slow steering and how it kept me so informed of conditions under the tyres.

At the apex, now full of the confidence it had instilled in me, I put my foot flat to the floor and listened, felt and saw how the car put down all its power straight to the tarmac without so much as a shimmy of complaint.

I drove back to the cottage, arriving perhaps seconds before my hour was up. I had decided to tell a story about how slowly I’d gone, this being the first time I’d been allowed to drive a Ferrari, without realising that was never going to wash, because the Mondial was always going to dob me in to my dad. Not because he’d had some kind of tracker fitted which would have revealed how fast I’d gone, but thanks to a no less incriminating phenomenon.

When finally brought to rest, hard driven Ferraris of that and previous eras ticked. You’d turn off the engine and listen as all is parts started minutely to contract back to post-thrash size.

I was just getting out when he appeared at my side. “Nicely warmed up I see?” he said, that ghost of a smile returning.

“Well, I’m not sure about that…”

“Good lad,” he interrupted, the smile now a broad grin, “I’d have been disappointed were it anything else.”

Main image photography by Matt Dunkinson.