The 812 every other 812 wants to be

The 812 is the best car on the road today – there, I said it.

It covers all bases: want it to be a hooligan? No problem, say goodbye to your rear tyres. Want to pulverise Europe on a 12 hour drive? No worries, see you in Monaco.

This thing is the zenith of everything Ferrari has perfected over the last 70 years…at least, it’s as perfect as they can possibly make it. All manufacturers are bound by various homologation rules, and they’re not going to build a different car for each country so they take a “one-size-fits-all” approach.

They find the most stringent laws a country has regarding emissions and they meet that requirement, same goes for suspension, wheel spacing etc etc.

Now to my mind this flies in the face of Ferrari’s whole modus operandi – Ferrari ownership has never been and should never be about compromise.

This is where we come in, we can unlock the final 10% of your car – give it the lungs it deserves, the shoes it deserves, the stance it deserves. Everything this car needs to get to where it should be, we’ve got.

Now we sell a lot of exhausts for 812s, the same goes for wheels, lowering springs, carbon etc. – but once in a blue moon we get a customer who goes “yep, I’ll have the lot” and the excitement levels go through the roof.

We’ve only done a handful of these “Christmas tree” spec modifications, and they have been – without question – the coolest cars we’ve worked on…and we work on a LOT of cars.

This particular customer’s car was specced fantastically well – Rosso Fuoco triple layer red for the exterior, black wheels, black interior. As starting points go, this isn’t a bad one.

He ordered the following for his car:

Exhaust

• Novitec valved rear silencers
• X pipe
• Decat pipes
• OBD Wizard
• Remote kit

This is what we refer to as a Stage 3 exhaust. Stage 1 being rear silencers alone (never the right option), Stage 2 being rear silencers and X pipe (typically what we sell, fantastic sounding…but there’s more to get out of the car if you’re brave enough)

This thing sounds like a Spitfire, it is easily one of the most violent and dramatic sounding cars on the road when you give it a boot – but the beauty of it is that the valves allow you to tame the beast and aside from the cold start (which is pretty brutal in fairness) it turns the car into a totally useable car, one which you can stand next to at idle and easily have a conversation next to.

The rear silencers finesse the tone, the X pipe lifts the pitch, the decat pipes boost the volume and then we pair it with the remote kit to open/close the valves & the OBD Wizard to cancel the CEL from the decats.

Aside from a Carrera GT with a £20,000 exhaust on it this is the best sounding car on earth – we won’t hear any different

 

Wheels & Suspension

 

The next thing to mention is the wheel/suspension selection this customer made

Novitec offer 3 wheel styles – the NF8 directional wheels, the NF9 symmetrical 10 spokes (5 bolt configuration) and the NF10 symmetrical 10 spokes with the centre lock cover.

This customer opted for the 21” front/22” rear NF10 wheels with the centre lock-look. The wheel is still a 5 bolt wheel, albeit it has a clever central cover which goes over the bolts and gives the appearance of a centre lock.

All the benefits – none of the drawbacks!

To go along with the new shoes we had to fix the gait of the car! As you can see in all the Ferrari marketing images Ferrari lowers their cars for pictures, but when they arrive with the customer they’ve had to hike the suspension up to meet various homologation requirements.

Marketing Image

Customer car

They look terrible as standard, sort of like a crossover SUV.

What we did here was to install the excellent KW x Novitec lowering springs and lower the car by 25mm.

The springs are variable rate, so ride quality is not compromised and bumpy road mode still works a treat. However, as soon as you start loading up the suspensions the springs stiffen and keep the car even more planted than it was before

Carbon Fibre

The final thing to go over are the carbon fibre items – and our school of thought here is actually that less is more.

We could throw everything at the car, and it does look fantastic, but ultimately we like to balance orders from a cost/benefit analysis.

Typically, we recommend going for carbon items that you CAN’T get from the factory – usually these include the wrap around chin spoiler and the 3 piece rear lip spoiler.

The Ferrari factory doesn’t offer either of these as standard, so it’s a really great (and not particularly expensive!) way to set your car apart.