Features

When people first see it, they have a moment of confusion, because it's challenging to look at. But we wanted to create a piece of art, something timeless, so that you appreciate it more the longer you look at it." Jason also styled the new Ferrari 599. He's working exactly where he wants to be.

Next, Ken Okuyama, the design director of Pininfarina. Ken is an engaging, magnetic character, who speaks with great intelligence and intense humour.

"The thing about Pininfarina," says Ken, "is that the company lets you, as a designer, take credit for what you've done. You sign the sketches. It's why I joined - you don't get that so much in big corporations.

"There is something in the air here. You can feel it, like you can at Oxford or any other great university. Though the people change, the same atmosphere remains." Ken has given his understudy Jason the space to express himself clearly with this car, helping with some guidance on occasion, but not interfering.

Paolo Garella runs the recently formed Special Projects Division of Pininfarina. He is a former supercar test pilot who brings a focused engineering slant to his work. He's driven the P4/5 at 275km/h. He, above all others, wants us to appreciate the finely detailed engineering that has been poured into this machine. Make no mistake, Paolo says, this is not a concept car, it's a Ferrari, fully sanctioned by Maranello.

It is designed to be easily serviced, and even comes with a 10-year parts warranty. The chassis underneath is the last-ever brand-new Enzo - a pleasantly high starting point, with a 660bhp, six-litre V12, 217mph top speed and 0-60mph time of 3.3secs. But Pininfarina designed the Enzo in the first place, so they knew what they were working with - the idea was to improve it.

At one stage the engineering team dropped an entire P4/5-shaped fibreglass shell, like a giant radio-controlled car body, over the Enzo chassis to make sure all the air inlets and outlets worked perfectly. Countless hours of windtunnel testing followed. The result is a car that develops more downforce than the Enzo and also less aero drag. It's 165kg lighter than an Enzo too.

In some ways, the construction of this car is even more impressive than its styling. Everything you see is bespoke, with over 200 unique parts built to beyond-aerospace (and beyond-Enzo) standards - from the laser-cut headlight clusters, to the glass, to the butterfly doors and their wonderful milled aluminium hinges, to the carbon fibre body panels, down to the wheels, machined from block aluminium.

Could those chunky, MechWarrior-like rims be the car's best feature? Probably. About 20 of them were destroyed for production validation. Eek.

"We would never put on the car anything that would spoil it," says Paolo. "Anything new would always improve the car. It was a great engineering challenge to make this design real and make it functional. Pininfarina has been designing Ferraris since the first one. And the company built its reputation in the early days with one-off specials. Producing custom cars is in Pininfarina's DNA.