Icedriving The Ferrari 12Cilindri V12
Driving a 12-cylinder, 830-horsepower Ferrari is good on any day, but testing it on the Southern Hemisphere Proving Grounds on ice has to rate as one of the top vehicle experiences possible. With a massively powerful, rear-wheel-drive, ultra-expensive car, you don’t always think of putting it on a bed of ice and snow. It doesn’t seem like its natural environment, but these cars are something else. The cars themselves were unmodified bar the studded winter tyres.
The day started at Millbrook Resort. From there, we took a ride to Cloudy Bay’s Te Wāhi vineyard for a stunning lunch in beautiful weather. As we finished, a flock of helicopters arrived to ferry our group directly to the snow fields high up in the mountains above Wanaka.
Seven brand new Ferrari 12Cilindri were waiting for us in all their glorious colours. We did a variety of learning and practice exercises from there, starting from the basics of getting a million-dollar supercar to slide around the ice through cones. This built up over the next half a day to a giant timed slalom course. As the sun set, it culminated in driving this outrageously powerful car on ice in the dark, which is an outrageous experience. Eventually, however, there came a time when it was simply too dark for it to be safe to drive anymore, and we took our bus to Wanaka’s Aosta restaurant for a beautiful dinner.
This event is part of the unique Ferrari experiences that run in a few places around the world, giving you access to extraordinary and unique opportunities that simply aren’t available to the public. In our group, just three were journalists, and all others were Ferrari owners from around New Zealand and Australia. Some had one Ferrari; most had several. There’s a passion that comes with Ferrari ownership that does not seem to be equalled elsewhere in the automotive world. It’s almost a religion.
I’ve had a lot of driving instruction and I’ve done many driving courses, and yet everything was different with this. You barely use the brakes. You use power to turn: point the wheels where you want to go and apply the power. More power, more power. They keep going, “more revs, give it more.” When the car revs over 9,000 RPM, that 6.5-liter V12 is peak engine music. It’s Beethoven, it’s Mahler.
Owning an exclusive car is a treat in itself; yet, this is a truly extraordinary experience that thrilled us all to a T. We didn’t care that it was minus one degree. The biggest stress we had all day was getting the temperature right in the cars. Two of the cars we had were open-top Spiders, and we ran them with the top down. With heated seats and stunningly potent heated ventilation, you weren’t really aware of the sub-zero temperature, other than the beauty of the incredible environment that you’re in. As for the car, it was stunning. A full, in-depth test drive will come at a later time, as you can’t really get a sense for something as exclusive as this when you’re sideways on an ice rink. But let’s just say that it’s a gorgeous piece of engineering that impressed everyone.
What a day, what a car.