QUITE FRANKLY, THE NOISE GIVES you the creeps. This engine, an all-new V6 that shares nothing but Maranello’s cutting-edge combustion know-how with any other Ferrari motor, sounds unlike anything else. Imagine, if you can, a jam session in which Luciano Pavarotti, Robert Plant, and Adele lay vocals over brutal, skull-thumping techno—composed by Verdi. At idle it is restless, impatient, eager. And promising. Blip the throttle with the transmission in neutral and the so-called “hot tube” will pump pulses of aural magic into the cabin. From the outside, though, an otherworldly high-frequency treble prevails. Then, as you summon first gear via what is surely the longest shift paddle in Ferrari history, all those peripheral whizzings, rumblings, and hissings coalesce into a solid, billowing, and, at times, unnerving high note.
What happens next depends largely on the selected drive mode. In Hybrid, the combustion noises may momentarily give way to fully electric near-silence. More surprised than convinced, you tend to then instinctively add a dozen degrees of throttle angle… And then you are back into the eye of that raging sonic storm—and a surreal surge of acceleration as if the world is falling into a little black hole of the 296 GTB’s own making.
The new engine is “only” a 2,992-cc six. But shift your thinking. In the old world, those were unimpressive numbers. But this is 2022, this a Ferrari internal-combustion engine and, in truth, this V6 is more vocal, more potent, and more extreme than most of the V8s and V12s that have served in Ferrari’s cavalli rampanti.
It is an engine to turn history upside down—literally. Opening up the bank angle from a generic 90° (Alfa’s Giulia Quadrifoglio V6, for example) to 120° has created the space
