BLOODLINES

TOP OF THE LIST of things I don’t want to hear at 4.15am is my alarm clock. Today, a very close second is the heavy patter of raindrops. That was emphatically not in the forecast. Judging by the demeanour of our guesthouse owner, I’m guessing that a new entry at the top of her own list is the high-idle drone of five flat-plane-crank V8s warming up at 5am. Still, one person’s cacophony is another’s amazing, laugh-out-loud, close-harmony quintet.

A gentle, warming trundle through the sleeping town pops us out onto the smooth, glistening sweep of a bypass. In the darkness, I’m tracking the glow of four pairs of round tail-lights, a constant of Ferrari’s mid-engined V8 model line – with the exception of the car I’m driving, a 348. This is no regular 348, though, because this is no gathering of regular V8 Ferraris.

Yowling along ahead are Ferrari’s feistiest and most focused production V8s – the 360 Challenge Stradale, 430 Scuderia, 458 Speciale and 488 Pista – and making up this full house of Maranello’s ‘special series’ V8s is the car I’m driving, the rarest of them all, the 348 GT Competizione. Just 50 were built and this is one of only eight right-hand drive examples.

So here we are, heading towards Denbigh in North Wales, in the UK, on shiny, black, empty roads. At least it has stopped raining. There are even tantalising glimmers of brightness in the dark sky, but as we drive further and climb higher, the temperature drops. Soon there’s snow on the hills around us, bright in the headlamps. Happily, dropping down the other side, the snow vanishes and, almost miraculously, the clouds break as we approach our photo location and – ta-da! – we get a sunrise. Relief all round.

348 GT COMPETIZIONE

the 348 GT Competizione wasn’t a car I’d been hankering to drive. How foolish of me. The GTC isn’t like other 348s; it doesn’t feel – and especially handle – like other