DOE DEE CHEE CHILL-IN-DREE [Italian, noun, ‘12 cylinders']

Not the first Ferrari with a literal name, but just possibly the last with a volt free V12 engine. Radical meets traditional in the 812’s replacement...

- OLLIE KEW

Just occasionally, something’s lost in translation between poison-tipped Italian and well-meaning King’s English. I’m standing alongside the new Ferrari in a Maranello studio. I ask Flavio Manzoni, the man who heads up the design department, if it’s possible to spec the black ‘mask’ bisecting its nose, the black roof section and the twin black aero flaps at the back in overall body colour. Manzoni rounds on me with derision. “If you ask to have them not in black... you walk on my body.” I think that’s an approximation of ‘over my dead body’. I’ll take that as a no then.

Some ideas translate more literally than others. You thought the 812 Superfast’s name was a bit obvious. Its successor – the latest in a storied lineage of front-engined super tourers stretching back through F12, 599, 575 and 550 through the 365 GTB/4 and beyond into Ferrari’s 1940s infancy – is named after its V12 engine. It is simply the ‘Twelve Cylinder’. Whoops, the laser eyes are burrowing into my skull again. You’re supposed to address it as ‘Dodici Cilindri’.

Obviously Italians are the undisputed world champions of making car related nouns sound poetic. Quattroporte. Testarossa. Scuderia and Competizione. But there’s something more nostalgic at play here, a sense that if Ferrari doesn’t celebrate the V12 now, it’s not a given it’ll get another golden opportunity. Later this year we’ll be presented with the first electric-only Ferrari. There are already two hybrids in the range, and downsized turbocharged engines have proliferated across the family. Meanwhile Bentley and Mercedes have abandoned their 12-cylinder engines. Nothing is sacred.