032 JULY 2019 →TOPGEAR.COM

Fer r a r i 348 – that’s the first Ferrari I’d ever seen in person, the

first Ferrari I’d ever touched with my own bare hands, the first

Ferrari I’d ever witnessed whizz past me on our roads. For

the teenage me back in the late ’ 90 s, the 348, with its timeless

design and the pop-up headlamps, was the car of my dreams,

the car that made me a Ferrari fan boy for life. So, when I

kickstarted my motoring journalism career in my early- 20 s,

I’d set myself a goal – to make myself capable enough to be

able to drive a Ferrari one day. Not own, but review them.

It seemed easier to achieve that goal back then. But a

decade later, I’d still not been at the wheel of one. This made

me promise to myself, the day I finally drove a Ferrari, I shall

hang up my boots. Why? Because I doubt there’s anything

else that would excite me more than driving a Ferrari. Yes, I

can be a bit biased. Love is blind, after all. Okay, things would

change if I were to drive a Formula 1 car, but what are the odds

of that happening. Obviously someone must’ve leaked my

voluntary retirement pact to the Ed, who promptly assigned

the upcoming Ferrari drive to me. As it turned out, it wasn’t

just any Ferrari drive, it was the 812 Superfast; the maddest,

the angriest and the noisiest Ferrari you could get today.

What you get for roughly ` 5. 2 crore (base price,

ex-showroom) is a naturally-aspirated monstrous V 12 ,

spitting out venomous 788 bhp and 718 Newtons, capable

of rocketing itself to 100 kph in 2. 9 s, 200 kph in 7. 9 s before

maxing out at 340 kph. Yes, those numbers for a front-engined

two-seater Gran Turismo sound mental, and that’s what this

super GT is at full swing. I don’t mind that one bit. What I do

though is the setting for our drive — Dubai. Nothing personal

against the city, the infrastructure there puts Mumbai’s to

shame, but the roads there are heavily governed by law and

most of them are arrow straight. What I need is more than an

open highway to put the angriest Ferrari through its paces.

So, I cooked up a plan, which turned out to be what most

Indian motoring journalists do in Dubai, and set the

navigation to Jebel Jais.

Since it’s my first time with a Ferrari, I take my time to get

familiarised with it, inside and out. I must have read almost a

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