2021 Ferrari 812 GTS Review - Is This The New Greatest Car, In The World... EVER!?

[Applause] [Music] so oh oh oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] hello everybody and welcome to the ferrari 812 gts this is a very very special car it's been an awful long time since ferrari have made a series production v12 convertible in fact you have to go way back into their past there have been drop top v12s in recent years but they've all been limited edition cars 550 bargetta 575 super america the 599 sa and the f60 america perhaps the rarest of all a very limited car made based on the f12 berlinetta and then they shocked everybody by announcing this not just because they announced it but because it was going to be a car with no limit on production beyond how many they could make in the time it was going to be available so what exactly are we looking at well quite simply this is ferrari's 812 super fast but with a folding hard top now when you get a car from ferrari there are a few things you have to agree to and one of the more curious is about comparing a car with others i don't mean like i'm not allowed to talk about other cars that'll be silly but if you wanted to go and do any real performance testing with something else you have to make sure it is an equivalent car i don't think that's actually that unreasonable and you want to make sure these things are done right of course but if you were to try and do such a thing with this car i'm genuinely not sure what you could actually compare it with the closest thing that i can think of would be an aston martin dbs valente that strictly speaking still isn't comparable because it's a soft top car and it's got twin turbos attached to its v12 where this makes more power without any kind of forced induction whatsoever just shy of 800 horses or if you do it in metric exactly 800 horses this thing is bonkers quick naught to 62 comes up in less than three seconds that's the official figure less than three seconds and top speed is more than 200 mile an hour anything with those kind of numbers is seriously fast and believe me when i say this is otherworldly quick in practice it hasn't actually been that long since i had my last ferrari press car which was the f8 spider and on paper you'd think that this should perform very similarly perhaps in terms of pure numbers it probably does it's how this car delivers that performance though that marks it out as being something just entirely alien but before we get on to that let's talk about the nitty-gritty the basics shall we this is 335 000 pounds this car that's actually and forgive me for these words coming out of my mouth now surprisingly cheap i say that only because the f8 spider press car that i had was 327 000 pounds it's only about eight grand less and that's a car that has a starting price of some 60 grand less than this one this is actually the ferrari prescott i've had with the least options on it [Music] what it's missing compared with the fa is all the exterior carbon this car has none doesn't have the jbl hi-fi doesn't in fact even have heated seats and that i think really is quite stingy for a 293 000 pound base price come on ferrari give us some basics this really is still very much a ferrari in all the senses of the word both good and bad and ferrari clearly are a company that really are making some decent progress with their cars it's the little things you notice and perhaps you'd only notice them as a ferrari owner or someone that deals with these a lot you might otherwise miss them things like the auto dimming rear view mirror and side mirrors things like this little rear window at the back which you can drop independently of the roof nothing really remarkable there but it has a memory position that sets it in exactly the right place so you get the least wind interference in the cabin that's brilliant i don't know why every convertible doesn't just do that it also sounds like that despite the fitment of the petrol particular filter the press release for this car is reasonably light on specifics about what they've changed compared with the superfast the coupe version the obvious bit of course is that much of the car from here backwards has had to be redesigned to accommodate that new rear end and it's a pretty damn good looking car in fact with the roof down it's absolutely sensational this thing attracts a lot of attention now the f8 spider was in giallo triple stratos it's a three-layer bright yellow paintwork and it's a mid-engine ferrari it looks like everyone expects a ferrari too this i think gets just as much attention if not perhaps a little bit more as a company a lot of people associate ferrari with the sort of fire and the passion and the being artsy fartsy like jazz and they don't really see them for what they actually are which is a very research-led heavily technological company that is constantly innovating and trying to find new ways of doing things but what people also don't realize is how small and intimate a company ferrari really is it genuinely is something like a family you cannot place the same expectations on a company like ferrari or mclaren or aston martin as you could on say porsche the economies of scale just aren't there and so there will be little things that they get wrong for example there's a really bad misalignment on that front bonnet on one side it lines up perfectly on the other it's about a good 10 mil off oddly i saw another 812 in a showroom recently that had exactly the same thing so at least they're consistent with their inconsistency now [Music] this thing is unbelievably quick i mean seriously jaw droppingly gobsmackingly unreasonably fast the fa i got the measure of that very quickly you get about five six miles in that car you know what it's all about you you get on with it this i've already done about 400 miles in and i still don't feel like i really really know it but i'm gonna just do the best job i possibly can of conveying the experience to you on account of that being my job and maybe if i do it well enough perhaps one day i could afford one of these for myself the funniest thing about this car i've been driving this car along with my good buddy james dean who is one of the few people i would trust to help me do drive-bys in something like this and trust that's kind of the key thing here this car has turned us both into uncle ben no no i don't mean we've been going around trying to sell microwave rice you drive this car and and you come out and the first thing you basically say is a lot of people shouldn't go near this car the fa i have something called the 21 year old test which is my thing of saying if you had a you know 21 year old son or friend or whatever and they were enthusiastic but also very sensible very level-headed and responsible would you trust them out on their own in the car something like an r8 yes absolutely with the f8 yes i would with this not a chance absolutely not i took this out the other day and i did a standing start and i'm not even talking a full ball launch control standing start no no i was just i just wanted to see kind of what it was like i was trying to get some of the sounds that you'll hear i do the little clips with the exhaust noise they're often separate to the review uh this car span its wheels from first to fourth fourth gear and this thing was still lighting its rear tires up absolutely unbelievable this thing is unreal of course this being a modern ferrari you've got the obligatory manatino and it has all the settings you more or less expect you've got wet sport race ct off and then cst off in the fa i dabbled quite a bit in both sport and race mode in this i have done a little bit in race mode but chiefly i've been in sport trust me on this one unless you are extremely confident extremely capable and you've got plenty of room around you leave it in sport race is very liberal when it comes to its intervention and it will let you get quite untidy before it decides to help you out sport is much smoother the intervention that happens is much more progressive and so if you want to stay alive when you're driving this car it's the best way to do it i have actually driven it when it was a little bit wet underfoot not exactly soaking but damp and she's lively she's very lively [Applause] [Music] i haven't had the pleasure of the regular 812 hoping at some point i'll be able to sample one but i'm told this car they backed it off just a little bit made it just a little bit more relaxed and i can't believe that having driven the f12 this is a car i'm actually very capable of relaxing in you wouldn't think it and i wouldn't have believed it but no you really can stick it in bumpy road mode put the roof down chill out i've already done 150 miles in this car this morning and they were glorious there are some issues wind noise in the cabin is actually pretty minimal thanks to some clever little spoilers they put up here but like the portofino you do get very chilly knees when it's not so warm outside 20 odd years ago honda realized that in a convertible you need a little fan over people's knees to help keep them warm i'm getting old you know come on i need my i need my knees warm i don't want to have to drive around with a little granny blanket although i'm sure ferrari would sell me one of those for about 3 000 quid allow me to maybe demonstrate to you the ludicrous savagery of this car so i'm currently in you know what i'm gonna put it in fifth this is a naturally aspirated engine so i'm doing 40 mile an hour now fifth gear that's 200 000 rpm and in fact let's let's add to this let's go up a hill okay so we're just going to get around this bend get a minor incline here okay so 40 mile an hour foot down that's 50. that's that's all that took getting some noise out of this car for you all because i know you enjoy that is quite tricky having to use the low gears a lot and that's really really tricky because when you're in second or first in this thing 800 horses going through those wheels [Music] you put your foot down she will want to move around you got to be ready for it and and she does like to move this thing tram tramlines like nearly nothing else i've ever experienced the 550 does it a little bit this does it a lot and that's why you become uncle ben because you just keep going around saying to everyone with great power comes great responsibility i can understand exactly why ferrari are so protective of some of the cars on their fleet i've been working with them now for about two years and this is the first time they've let me loose in an 8 12 and i bear them absolutely no ill will whatsoever for making sure that i was ready to take the plunge because yeah you got to be certain of it so some other negative points for you the steering wheel indicators are just as infuriating as they always have been i did have one idea recently because these are the later style which you've got like a little little wings they hang over the back of the wheel and i thought it'd be really nice if you could actually use those for both directions so i've got my left hand indicator here and maybe if you pull it down it'll go left but i thought if you pulled it up it could then go right a bit like mclaren do with the paddle for the gear change you can go both directions on either side that'll be really handy i think gear changes very fast that's in sport mode by the way race is even more brutal allow me to show you so i'll give you a few downshifts in race and an upshift i'm real absolutely unreal i gotta say despite the fitment of the obligatory petrol particular filter i don't really think the noise this car has suffered do you i think it's just about right and the really good thing is that they've judged it perfectly because when you're done playing the hooligan you just relax and cruising around now you put your foot down you get a little bit of noise but on the motorway it's quiet it's easy you can hear yourself think with the roof up this car's ridiculously refined and you can have that window at the back down you don't even realize i mean legitimately i took someone out and yesterday of 10 minutes they didn't even know the window was open amazing car [Music] and then you get the silly little stuff like the fact that you cannot see what the hvac panel is doing you just can't the lights on it are far too dim so when you're trying to get some air in this thing because it won't warm you up very well but auto mode tries to heat the windscreen that's useless when the roof is down so you're trying to hit the button and it's lighting up different combinations of face and leg and everything and you just know what's going on is that texan just go back to the old-fashioned dial which points to stuff that was much easier it worked fine the seats themselves not actually a huge fan of i prefer something a little bit more sculpted particularly in a car with this kind of performance what is really great though i mean truly great is the view because you can actually see those sort of haunches you don't really realize until you actually sat in the car just how pronounced those arches are but it gives you a real good sense of where the car is it means it's not actually as intimidating to drive down a road like this as you might think it's very cool too to see a little icon lighting up to tell you that drs has been engaged underneath the car somewhere there is a little flap that evidently is trying to reduce the drag just a just a fraction well you can you can really take some liberties with it the traction control is good but i just don't have that automatic trust in it that i did with the fa this is a car that even in the five days i've got it i managed to bagsy it for an extra day by booking it on the bank holiday weekend you're gonna take a long long time i think to really plumb the depths of this car the great thing about it though is that it is more or less only as scary as you want it to be because it has so much go in it all the time you can really choose just how much of it you really want to access so you can drive this car and you could never go beyond about four and a half thousand rpm and you would still make exceedingly good progress you'd be doing absolutely fine but then you realize it goes all the way to nine down this particular road if you really absolutely have to get from one end to the other as quickly as you possibly can a mclaren 720 is gonna do it quicker it's got that balance you get with a mid-engine car the slightly superior grip amazing handling feel and tactility and it really is a work of art the mclaren but this is just another level of special it really demands of you as a driver but if you're in the mood for that it will also reward like pretty much nothing else [Applause] hello okay let's talk steering not quite as brilliant as the f8 doesn't have that texture and that ideal weighting that i really really enjoy it's quick as is the ferrari tradition and honestly with the car of this capability i think it's actually necessary but it does have some feel to it does have some feedback the 812 was one of ferrari's first cars with electric power steering and actually it's not horrific not their best in fact actually i recently drove an ff and that surprised me because the steering in that some of the best in a ferrari i've ever experienced totally did not expect that but you know what the car is doing everything is a bit exaggerated because you are essentially sat over the rear axle you're so far removed from the front of the car it's also got the virtual short wheelbase which is all-wheel steering that means it's it's pretty darn agile in truth if you would like an analogy for this car that is perhaps related to something people will have experienced imagine you took a honda s2000 and you locked it in a room with three tons of cocaine and protein powder this is the car that would come out at the end i'm not scared by it that would be untrue to say but i am immensely immensely respectful of what it can do what its ability level is and what my ability level is the roads that i'm on the people around me everything else maybe if i was chris harris i could just instantly drop in this thing and just hoof it around every corner like some sort of god but i'm not and i can't sorry about that [Applause] if you are looking at your first ferrari please don't buy this if you love the idea of something like the 550b you just don't want a car that old buy a roma a genuinely spectacular car really honestly it's one of the best infrareds lined up at the minute and that's a hard thing to say because right about now ferrari are on form their lineup is spectacular you've got the f8 the f8 spider i love both of those the rome is brilliant portofino is brilliant the lusso sadly now gone but that was very good too that's the race mode downshift now the f8 did have one very large achilles heel scuttle shake this somehow does not and that really does surprise me because i would have thought that with this car maybe the gts wasn't always part of the plan with the f8 blindingly obvious they're going to make a spider of it with this i didn't think it was going to be a guarantee so you'd think perhaps it was just more inherently compromised historically saying that the 550 bargetta was apparently awful as a thing to drive because it wasn't built to have the roof cut out of it but this somehow it just doesn't suffer yes it's a relatively heavy thing you're talking about around 1.8 tonnes it's about 50 kilos or something like that heavier than the standard car because of all the extra bracing but then so is the f8 spider and yet that is a sort of wobbly old thing that doesn't really cope with this kind of road very well at all this takes it in its stride is there scuttle shake yeah i'm sure there is but it's what you might call trace amounts this is a licensed loser oh it really is now there's a school of thought which i do subscribe to that says it's much more fun to drive a slow car fast than a fast car slow absolutely agree with that however there is another school of thought which is relevant here today i always remember when i had my little scooter and that would only do about 85 miles an hour at tops you know with a tailwind down a hill and that i was absolutely full throttle everywhere always trying to get the most out of it that i could but then when i started to ride big bikes 600s that sort of stuff that would do serious speed i was quite happy to do 70 everywhere because i knew that i could do double that if i wanted to i wasn't so close to maximum that i might as well just go for it i was so far away from maximum there wasn't really any point trying and i found that you can do that in this too you stick it in bumpy road mode it backs off a little bit and you can enjoy it at low speeds the suspension in this is definitely firm there's no two ways about it it's not the most costing it's not the most comfortable roma much more comfortable as was lusso as are some of the other cars in the range as well portofino so on and so forth but that's okay this guy has an ability level that is such i kind of understand it f12 i recall being quite a bit more comfortable than this but this is certainly certainly far from uncomfortable to the extent that i have on a few occasions driven around without bumpy road being on and i've totally forgotten whenever you change mode on the manatino it will reset the bumpy road setting so every time you play with that you have to press bump your road again in town people go absolutely nuts for this car i mean they they really seriously love it i've i've rarely driven anything that gets this level of adoration i also happen to love the speck of this particular car tour de france blue exterior savior and blue interior wonderful there's leather carbon fiber beautiful stitching details everywhere in here this really does feel like a very special car and with the f8 spider 327 000 pounds compared to its rivals i did figure that was a kind of a difficult car to justify at that particular money this though i mean like i said it doesn't really have a rival but i actually feel like it's um it does feel better value legitimately it is tough to describe something that's over three hundred thousand pounds as good value but such as it is this really is a car that doesn't have an awful lot of faults that is pretty much the greatest engine ever made up front and there isn't a lot that really lets the car down it looks absolutely spectacular it's a glorious thing to drive around in being able to just experience this v12 without a roof on is just marvellous the fact the chassis doesn't seem to have suffered for cutting the roof off is incredible yes it's a 1.8 ton car trust me does not feel it does not feel it at all and i've driven a few cars where they've tried to mask the weight by just making the steering quick and so on and you can eventually tell with this no down my favorite b rhodes i would probably be faster in an f8 but i would be happier in the 812 in auto mode and yes shoot me but i have used auto mode quite a bit it's very good it will shuffle through to seventh before you know it third fourth fifth sixth seventh and i'm doing 30 miles an hour and it's fine the best bit as well is the ferrari actually seemed to have calibrated auto mode quite well you could reasonably expect them to have not spent any time on auto mode because it's a ferrari who wants to drive that in automatic but no take time they have because this is a very smart gearbox it knows this engine is massively talking powerful so when you put your foot down it'll only change maybe one or two gears in most scenarios unless you put your foot all the way flat and that's the right thing because this car's got plenty of shove from low down so that's all it needs to do i've known other cars where they'll try and change like four gears at a time or more and that just means you're waiting for ages and then when it does give you some acceleration it's often far too much even the brakes very nicely calibrated these are great big carbon ceramic stoppers as you'd expect at the price point but they're smooth they're easy to modulate you sit in here and with that view out this interior that soundtrack this really is the complete package if you want to nitpick about little things then a ferrari has never been the car for you if what you're looking for is the best car ever built you should probably buy a lexus ls but in my opinion if you want something even just a little bit exciting if you want in my opinion the greatest car the greatest performance car ever made it's this i don't say that lightly people ask me all the time what my favorite car is and historically i don't really have an answer now i might because this thing is genuinely spectacular i spend a lot of time worrying about the future of the automobile particularly one with an internal combustion engine in it and it seems increasingly certain that very soon there will be a time when things like this not only will you not be able to buy them you might not be able to drive them either [Music] so if this really is the combustion engine's last stand its final hurrah i think i can at least gladly say that it really did go out on a high note and the fact that ferrari haven't even limited production of this i commend them for yes in theory it's not limited in practice it is because simply put there are more people that want these than they're going to make of them but trust me if you can if there is any chance anyway at all that you can get your hands on one of these cars just do it please do it and enjoy it for as long as you can for about 25 years as far as i was concerned the best car in the world ever was the ferrari 355. i know jeremy clarkson changed his mind about that fairly quickly but i didn't really even compared to my own 550 i will concede actually in a lot of ways that the 355 is a better ferrari i knew that it would take an awful lot to topple that car from its mighty place on the podium and i think this does it it's amazing it is also by far the most complex car i have ever driven it is part supercar it is part gt car it is a convertible it can be when it wants to be a coupe a it is wild but it is also at some points quite relaxing it is a car that has such amazing depth of talent i feel like i've only really paddled in the shallow end and i feel like i've maybe done it a gross injustice but i hope that you've enjoyed today's video and my vague attempt at explaining what it's all about thanks for watching please like comment down below subscribe if you haven't already and i'll see you for the next one bye [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: JayEmm on Cars

Views: 182,943

Keywords: Car, Sound, Review, Comparison, JayEmm on Cars, Ferrari 812 GTS, 812 GTS Review, 812 superfast vs GTS, Ferrari F12 vs 812, Ferrari 812 GTS Review, Best car in the world ever, Greatest car in the world ever, Jeremy Clarkson 812, Ferrari 812, F12 America, F60 America, 550 Barchetta

Id: SNz8v-csMZI

Length: 30min 38sec (1838 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 05 2021