The trouble with Ferrari is that it's a marque beloved by the fawning sycophant. Objectivity is lost in the clamour for favour, to be there at the hallowed gates of Maranello when the latest model is launched. Only with the benefit of hindsight and the safety net of consensus can a Ferrari be critically acclaimed. There's little reason to suggest the Enzo Ferrari will be different. Gushing hyperbole will crash over it, but early indications hint that Ferrari may have got this one right where it got the F50 so wrong.

Many Ferraris are predictable. You win the lottery, play for a Premiership football team or make it big in dotcom insolvency and chances are you'll buy a Ferrari. A red one. Some would call it definitive, others formulaic. For those who don't want to tread this path, for the truly monied tifosi, Ferrari has long offered alternatives. Cars that tread the fine line between genius and reckless folly, hypercars that have become standard bearers for the whole Ferrari brand.

"The Enzo is brutal, angular, and from some angles spectacularly ugly."

The mid eighties 288GTO was the first, the most beautiful and became one of the most sought after sports cars of its era. Next came the seminal F40, launched in 1987 but still held by many to be the greatest road car ever. The F50 was next, representing Ferrari attempting to sell F1 technology to the masses. Hugely powerful but poorly packaged, the F50's rarity alone will guarantee demand. Only 350 were ever built. The Enzo follows in this tradition and aims to demolish all previous yardsticks of road car performance and handling. As Luca di Montezemolo, Ferrari's dapper supremo noted, "We wanted to go further with a road car design than our company has ever gone before. I had to be sure everyone understood that this was to be a super-extreme Ferrari, so I asked our designers and engineers to go a little too far with their work in the beginning, knowing that they could restrain the design and technology a little, if necessary."

At first glance it appears that little restraint was in fact required. The Enzo is brutal, angular, and from some angles spectacularly ugly. There's a functionality about it that's beautiful though and in a world where Renault Clios are described as extreme, the Enzo does justice to the term. The huge butterfly doors with their arching window lines, the F1-style frontal treatment, the exposed mid-mounted engine, the warty tail lights and the box section flanks make a Lamborghini Murcielago or a McLaren F1 look decidedly mass market.

The work is credited to Lorenzo Ramaciotti, MD of Pininfarina and Diego Ottina, a Pininfarina veteran, along with aerodynamic expert Stefano Carmassi. Work started at Pininfarina's Cambiano studio in early June 1998 and three studies were subsequently created before being whittled down to one in January 2000.

Project leader Giuseppe Petrotta was the ringmaster charged with project managing the Enzo build. The results are a testament to his Formula One expertise. With a 6.0-litre V12 generating 660bhp, shifting a mere 1365kg shouldn't present too many problems. 62mph flashes by in 3.65 seconds, 124mph in 9.5seconds and the maximum speed hovers somewhere around 217mph. Whilst the McLaren F1's speed record of 241mph is safe for the time being, it'd be a brave man who'd back the McLaren to put a lick on the Enzo around a race track.

Fitted as standard with Ferrari's F1 sequential manual paddle shift gearchange, the Enzo is far from the raw, back to basics racer the F40 was. Traction control, launch control and the most astonishing set of brakes fitted to any road car all make the team sheet. Those stoppers are huge Brembo carbo-ceramic numbers, specially designed for the Enzo and which are effective from cold and can generate the sort of deceleration trauma when hot last witnessed when the captain of HMS Nottingham decided to nip downstairs for a cup of char. Likewise the Bridgestone Potenza RE050 Scuderia tyres were custom designed for the Enzo. Little more than hand-cut slicks they can deliver monstrous grip in the dry, although it's doubtful too many owners will want to take their £425,000 toy out if the weather looks like it's on the turn.

Recent V12 Ferraris have gained something of a reputation for being somewhat shy in the vocal department. The Enzo rectifies this. Reassuringly quiet at ambling speeds in order to pass EU drive-by noise regulations, depress the accelerator a few inches and it clears its throat with the most primal bellow. There's nothing synthetic about this sound, it's just the sound of automotive fury. Inside the claustrophobically dark cabin the aural barrage directly behind your head threatens to climb through the bulkhead. A proper Ferrari engine, then.

Acceleration defies description - just keep your eyes open and hang on. Here is a synthesis of electronic governance and ridiculous power that works. The control systems add to the driving experience rather than detract from it, but the temptation to switch them off, to experience 660bhp with nothing more than your right foot to marshal them will be too great for some. Yet somebody is going to be the first to bin an Enzo, to be the poster boy on www.wreckedexotics.com. That would be too much to stomach. Michael Schumacher recommends you keep the traction control switched on and I'd concur with Schuey.

Being impervious to fawning hyperbole, the final judgement. It's a dreadful car, Ferrari's worst in living memory. It's neither quick enough nor good looking enough to be remembered as a future classic, only its rarity making it in any way memorable. And as you might well deduce, I'm a singularly unconvincing liar.