Ferrari California T car review: ‘It reads your mind’
The Ferrari did something to me, cognitively. I don't know whether it was the alarm going off in my head, screaming "200,000", or the bright yellow brakes visible through the wheels, ramming home how much sheer metal work it takes to stop a machine such as this, once it gets moving. Perhaps it was because it arrived not with a driver so much as a minder and I felt the obscure urge to reassure him, as if I'd taken possession of an evacuee.
Immediately, basic skills like observation and decision-making were shot: from the inside, I couldn't figure out how to open the door, only the window. In a perverse bid to protect the roof from my own fingernails, I opened the fold-down roof to take my jumper off (this takes 14 seconds and is like watching an acrobat climb into a tiny box). I was never not surprised by the roar of the ignition, nor anything but astonished by the acceleration. As the fresh acts of folly piled up, I couldn't even reassure myself that nobody was watching; in a Ferrari, someone is always watching. The cliche is that it makes you feel like a film star, which is true. That film star was Mr Bean.
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