Features

So you get in, itching to go. But you don't go anywhere, at least for a few minutes. Because you're paralysed by the extraordinary world you find yourself in. The cabin is beautiful and to me even better than the outside, because it's more inventive, more progressive and yet even more identifiably Italian. The seats have supercar bolstering, but they're covered in a wonderful woven leather.

The bits that look like aluminium are exactly that. In fact they're machined from solid, so for each car they start with 100 kilos of metal and end up with 5kg of switches and doorhandles and 95kg of swarf. Meanwhile the dash and console are naked carbon fibre. This has more to do with it being cheap to tool-up for a low-volume hand-built machine than with it having anything to do with a racetrack, but the material shimmers seductively in the Northern Italian morning sunlight.

Press a starter button. It's answered by a lengthy ring of starter motor. Just as you're thinking it'll never fire, you get punched in the chest by an explosion of V8 tailpipe lunacy. This is one aristocratic engine. It's made by Ferrari, related to the Maserati unit of the Quattroporte, and GranTurismo, but instead of 4.2 litres it's 4.7, and so gets an extra 50bhp. That makes 450. Blip the throttle and it sounds that number. At the very least.

The 8C isn't made for dawdling but it will trickle along without reluctance: at low revs, if you stay off the throttle the noise is kept somewhere the sociable side of outrage, and it's possible to persuade the paddleshifted transaxle automated-manual gearbox into moderately soft-edged shifts.

But once you start work on the accelerator, delicious sonic craziness is all yours. It's distinctive, too, with a lot more bass in the mix than a Ferrari, but with the edgy top-notes intact. You can make it woofle, you can make it scream. And when it is screaming, the noise echoes its way around the hard-surfaced cabin for maximum effect. This is in no way a peaceful tourer.

So while we're at it, let's press the sport button on the console. Normally there's a valve to muffle the exhaust a little below 4,000rpm. Sport mode locks this out. It also quickens the throttle pedal travel, shortens gearchange times and gives you extra leeway on the ESP threshold.

So with 450bhp cracking away at 1,585kg, it's fast. Fast in that highly-tuned naturally-aspirated way: you have to go and fetch the power from the far end of the rev-counter, so you're staying with the car, tipping the paddles at the just-so moment, stoking the red-hot fire ahead.

When the needle swings beyond 4,000 there's a really sharp step in the force, and another one - less significant but still enticing - at about 6,000, from where the 8C's pants properly catch alight and it charges for the 7,500rpm red-line as if that were the only place to find an extinguisher.