German Car Zone

"I picked up my 599 at the dealer on thursday, and spend all friday driving it 800 miles across Europe back home.

This car is pure sex. Its that simple. I've found a new mistress and her name is 599GTB...

I love this car. The way it drives is just brilliant. The engine is simply out of this world. It's so strong and smooth across the entire range. Can be driven in 6th all day, or you can flip it down a few gears and go ballistic.

I'm impressed by the way the car can find grip. Floor it and it just finds grip for the power - it's generations beyond the 575 which it replaced. The 575 could be somewhat wobbly under full throttle. None of that here - just grip.

Mine's a F1 which I can really recommend in the 599. It's labelled "F1 Superfast" which is no exaggeration. Its not so much a change as a "click" into next gear. No jerkiness - it's not a "snap" - just a "click", and off it goes in the next gear. It doesn't take your head off like others can have a tendency to do at full throttle.

You can make very smooth standing starts in it - it'll feel like the engine is dying for a sec, but it doesn't - it just starts moving smoothly. I've queued quite a bit in it across europe (don't go across europe on a friday), and its extremely easy even with the F1 although in the end I put it in auto just because I got lazy after the first 2 hours.

I ordered it with the steering wheel LED's, which I am beginning to think was a very bad idea. The problem is I've become strangely addicted to getting them to light up every chance I get. Across Germany the real sport was getting them to light up in 6th which they do at 251kph (156mph). Unfortunately traffic was horrible, so I only got it up to 272kph (170mph). If you cherish your driving license, do consider carefully if you want to order it with those...

The car was very stable at 250kph (155mph). When driving I found the "natural" high speed for the car was around 230kph (140mph) where it was very comfortable and it didn't even feel like you were going particularly fast. Unfortunately that now means I have to move to Germany...

The car looks very good once you see it in real life. It looks a LOT better in the real world that it does in pictures. The proportions are better, and it's smaller than it looks in pictures. Had a 612 owner come up to me while fueling who said exactly the same thing. He thought it was gorgeous as well, and do indeed look smaller in real life than on pics.

In short: Get this car if you can. It's not just good - it's really out of this world. Just sell your children and pawn your wife. You don't care about them anyway when you get this car...

In perspective I hated the 575 when I just got it - my first call went to the dealer saying "take it back" - not until I got the suspension fixed and some other stuff changed did I actually like it. The 599 I loved from the first drive.

After having spend a day with it I did notice some minor issues:

- At night the TFT is a bit too bright for my taste. I would like to be able to either dampen it more - if you turn down the dimmer completely it dampens some, but the speedo/rev counter becomes unreadable. Alternatively it should have some sort of "blackout" setting where it's either off or designed so that only the most needed information is there.

- The engine braking is pretty insane in 1-2-3 - meaning if you gear down and brake in queues you get a brake-brake-downshift-B*R*A*K*E feeling, so I found its better not do downshift, which I have to get used to since I normally do that.

- They put 2 small "moodlights" in the roof console, which lights up the center console at night - thats all fine, but the 2 lights themselves aren't deeply enough recessed, and are quite visible when you look in the rear view mirror. Small issue, but one that could have been avoided easily.

- The navigation system is sh*t. Radio/cd/mp3 quite decent, but the navigation function is crap. They really need to team up with someone other than Becker and get a map into that TFT screen in the dash. I need to find a replacement here but the main problem is that a flipout can't immediatly fit, since it's recessed quite deeply behind the flap.

The F1 always starts in auto when you start the engine. Yep - not joking. Every time. At least it switches it off immediatly if you change into second manually. I hope they change this to "last state" in a update, but we'll see. On the other hand they have now made it so that if you really are driving in auto and flip a gear manually it does not switch off Auto - it stays in auto until you click it off on the button. This way you can "override" the gear without interrupting the auto function which was quite handy in queues.

Having rainsensitive wipers and automatic headlights are quite nice, although it almost feels "wrong" in a Ferrari. Next they'll be fitting a cupholder... (which would actually be nice to have when driving far)

Anyway - I'll take a few pics once I get my hands on my camera again (my wife "stole" it for a couple days while visiting relatives - why she'd want pictures of those is beyond me, but thats whole another story).

My biggest problem now is that I'm kinda considering whether this car made my F430 obsolete... Poor F430..."

He seems satisfied...