The front wings curve and curl ahead of you, the monstrous V12 bellows and barks behind you. The revs keep rising: 7000, 8000, 9000rpm. This is getting ridiculous. But it’s hard to back off, because there’s just a little bit of me that now thinks he’s Chris Amon and that this isn’t a road in France, but a track in America. Florida to be more precise, Daytona to be absolutely specific. And I’m winning the Scuderia’s first 24-hour race in the western hemisphere. Because that’s what he and Lorenzo Bandini did in 1967 and it is that event this car I’m driving exists to honour. It hasn’t won another since. But back off I do for I am neither Chris nor Lorenzo and, much as I’d like it to be otherwise, this is not a 1960s prototype sports racing car.

But it is the first time Ferrari has called a car ‘Daytona’, the 1967 front-engined 365 GTB/4 merely acquiring that name informally after that famous win. In full this is the Ferrari Daytona SP3, the third and most recent in Ferrari’s Icona series of spectacularly styled and even more spectacularly priced limited series supercars. The first two, the SP1 and SP2, appeared in 2018 and were intended to evoke memories of Barchetta-bodied Ferrari road-racing roadsters of the 1950s. No need to be told which car inspired the SP3: those voluptuous curves are pure P4. The slatted back looks P5 to me or, to be strictly accurate, like Pininfarina’s Project 222 study from which the P5 would have been derived had the FIA in 1968 not slapped a 3-litre limit on Group 6 prototype racing cars. It is gorgeous.

It’s fairly special under that gleaming paint too: a carbon body fused to a carbon tub cradling the most powerful V12 engine Ferrari has ever made for either a road or racing car. It has 829bhp. Just think about that for a moment. Other contenders? Well the LaFerrari had 950bhp, but only once its V12 had been externally boosted from 789bhp by an electric motor. The FXX-K Evo did have an 848bhp V12 but can be used neither on road nor for racing. But surely one of Ferrari’s V12 F1 cars would have had more power than this? Surely not. In Formula 1, its last 3.5-litre car was the 412T in 1994 and according to Ferrari it made 750bhp. It was followed by a less-powerful 3-litre V12 before the Scuderia adopted a V10 configuration. From the sports racing world, the 712 Can-Am car of 1971 also never got past 750bhp. So yes, Ferrari’s most powerful V12 for either road or race use, ever.