Ferrari F12tdf vs Eurofighter

Last week we ran a Ferrari F12tdf review. If you haven’t read it already, it’s here. But if you can’t be bothered to click through and read that, here’s what you need to know: It’s flipping frightening.

I know, it looks placid in this picture doesn’t it? It’s just toying with you, like one of those angler fish, gently luring you in with it’s bobbing lamp before a mouth full of razor teeth snaps out of the darkness. Anyway, I survived and after my fingers had stopped jittering, I managed to write those words. However, that wasn’t the whole story...

…because the story we did for the magazine (on sale now – plug over) was a bit more involved. This is how it looks in the mag – personally I think it’s one of the best opening images and headlines we’ve done in a while. Top work by photographer Lee Brimble. And yep, that’s the Kenny Loggins lyric made famous by Top Gun. For the young, it’s a film about fighter planes and homo-erotic volleyball. Anyway, headline suited the car almost perfectly, and suited what we were doing with it completely perfectly.

Because one of the things about the latest crop of supercars in general, and the Ferrari F12tdf in particular, is how much they rely on their computers and electronics to not only make the car safer, but faster. Without them, says Ferrari, you’d be slower. Without them, says me, you’d crash.

Anyway, in requiring electronic intervention to keep the thing pointed in the right direction and maximise its potential, the F12tdf has a lot in common with...

…a Eurofighter Typhoon.

Yep, the £70 million-a-pop fighter plane is designed to be aerodynamically unstable, which makes it ridiculously agile, but also means that if the flight control systems were turned off, it would fall out of the sky. Well, unless the pilot was able to make 50 inputs per second.

Anyway, we’re getting ahead of ourselves a bit, because the Typhoon came later. What came first was trying to spot one in the air, which we did by driving the F12tdf around the Mach Loop in Wales.

Heard of it? It’s a lap roughly made up of the A470, A487 and A489 south of Dolgellau and north of Machynlleth in west Wales. It’s where fighter pilots go to hone their skills. Top Gun with added sheep. They bat around here at 600 knots way below the summits of Cadair Idris and Cribben Fawr. It must be an absolute rush.

So at 6am on a Tuesday morning I went and drove a lap in the Ferrari. It’s 32.4 miles long and took me 45 minutes. There were some roadworks and a few towns and villages to deal with, and I wasn’t being daft because, well, it’s someone else’s spiky, angry £338,000 limited edition supercar.

I didn’t find it difficult getting out of bed at the B&B when I had an F12tdf key on the bedside table. Even by the mad standards of stuff I get to drive, this one felt really special – something I’m pretty sure I won’t be driving again anytime soon. I worried a bit about waking everyone else up, but the truth is that the F12tdf makes less song and dance of a cold start than my R8 V10 Plus.

I took this on the local petrol station forecourt on my way back. Mesmerising as the car is, the drive hadn’t been a belter – The F12tdf was too much car for the road and conditions. Too ill-suited really – I was barely scratching the surface of what it can do and both car and driver were ill-at-ease.

Here’s part of the reason why. Leaves sucked into the gap above the rear diffuser. Wet leaves. Sucked up from dark roads. The Ferrari’s headlights aren’t bad for early morning use, but nor are they as blindingly bright as the laser lights fitted to the Audi R8 V10 Plus.

The reason I mention the Audi is that we had it along as the chase car. I know, quite some chase car. On these roads, in these conditions, it was unflappable, night and day different to the Ferrari. I’ve purposefully not been cleaning it so it looks like a properly used autumnal supercar, but as you can probably tell in this shot, taken just after the F12tdf had descended from its transporter, the Audi’s Vegas Yellow paint looks a bit flat next to the Giallo Ferrari.

Have to say that the Ferrari does produce clouds at cold start. This is reflected in the economy figures we got from it. I know, I know, no-one cares what a 770bhp supercar does to the gallon, but have some info anyway.

After 114 miles on Welsh A and B roads it swallowed 55.11 litres. That’s 9.4mpg. The next day, which included a fair bit of cruising on our way up to meet the Typhoon at BAE Systems HQ near Preston yielded 12.9mpg. So there you go.

Before I drove it, I had a good pore over the tdf. Matt finish carbon clads pretty much the whole cockpit and looks tremendous. I particularly like this artful curve – not just for the way it looks, but how solid it feels. There’s no flex to it at all.

I manual-geared the F12tdf the whole time, just so I felt I had more control over the engine and was more aware and involved. This is not a car that’s easy to lose concentration in, but if you did… well, it would probably be too late.

And this is where the Manettino spent most of its time. Stuck down in Wet. Actually it didn’t – one click up in Sport allowed the tdf to feel a bit freer yet still provide a broad safety net. Initially I’d done what I normally do in a Ferrari: shove it straight in Race and adjust up or down from there.

I was trundling from the transporter drop-off point up to our first photo location on the Mach Loop and at pretty much the first bumpy corner I came to, the F12tdf let go at the back. A fast snap, back in line before I’d done much about it. But a warning. From that moment on I decided Race mode was probably too much.

To be fair, the Ferrari’s Manettino settings are very well judged. As with many other systems they tie together a lot of settings: engine, gearbox, dampers, traction control. However, in many cars you end up trying to work out how you can soften the dampers while ramping up the throttle response, but here they all feel very cohesive.

It’s beautiful in that part of the country, but pretty much the only birds we saw flying around the Mach Loop were the feathered variety. OK, one Hawk trainer and a clattering great Chinook about ten foot over the treetops, but not a Typhoon in sight. Hardly a surprise. And as far as photography goes there’s only a couple of sections on the Loop that actually work well. With those exhausted, we went exploring.

I absolutely love this shot of Lee Brimble’s. It’s like the F12tdf is speeding away from a volcano. It was taken further north on one of the greatest B-roads in the whole of the British Isles. The last thing I drove down it was Hyundai’s WRC car for a story we did immediately after Wales Rally GB last year.

Here the roads were tighter which meant I could exploit the Ferrari a bit more. The roads had also dried out a bit so on a couple of occasions I actually managed to hold on until one or two of the change-up lights illuminated. That still meant there was 3,000rpm of the epic V12 that was mostly left unexplored due to traction limitations.

Nevertheless, I was starting to get to grips with the tdf more. As I explained in the review, it’s a car that demands a very particular driving style. Utter precision in every input. Never get greedy or carried away. It’s tremendous in an addictive, dare-you, sort of way, but you must never drop your guard, always be wary. Driving it is a bit like grabbing a tiger by the tail.

But as I said, we also had my R8 lifer along. I told everyone we needed it as a chase car, but mainly it was because I didn’t want to pass up the opportunity to drive it on these roads (I’ve often bemoaned the fact the R8 spends too much of its time trolling up and down motorways). I know they’re not direct rivals, but one doesn’t half reflect light on the other.

The Audi is way quicker down a B-road, instantly trustworthy and companionable. I love how low you sit, how good the visibility is, how the road fast-forwards through the screen. I don’t think the Audi’s drivetrain suffers that much in comparison to the Ferrari’s either. The 602bhp V10 is a wondrous thing, so sharp, so biddable, so smooth, plus so exciting and aurally striking. I stuck it straight into full house Dynamic mode with no concern.

What the Audi can’t match is the tdf’s turn-in grip and agility. I’m not sure there’s much on earth that can actually, so maybe that’s not surprising. However, this is one of the Audi’s few foibles – turn-in could and should be sharper, the front end needs that extra bite, maybe a quicker rack and more steering weight, too.

Apart from that, not only did I feel safer in the R8, but had just as good a time, too. Honestly, the R8 is such an easy car to underestimate. It’s a massive, massive talent.

In comparison the Ferrari feels artifically enhanced – like a photo run through Snapseed. Almost better than the real thing, but maybe a tad over-sharpened. Certainly for road use.

From Wales we made our way as night fell to our hotel near Preston. Only we didn’t because the booking had been cocked up, leaving us stranded at 10pm with nowhere to stay and a £338,000 supercar to hide for the night. Step forward a tucked away Travelodge and a couple of obliging van drivers.

This is what it was all about. The Typhoon is built by BAE Systems in a massive hanger at Warton. I was given a tour of the production line. It blew my mind. The assembly of this plane is astonishing, the technology, craftsmanship and engineering is something I could have savoured for hours.

They pulled a finished one out of the hanger for us and Lee took this shot. Couple of things: see how low the cockpit sides are? You sit high in the bubble with panoramic all-round visibility, powered along by something like 45,000 pounds of thrust and an ability to hit 9G in turns. The facts and figures are remarkable. With afterburners engaged it can go from zero to take-off (around 130mph) in eight seconds. In under two and a half minutes it can be travelling at Mach 1.6, 36,000 feet in the air. That’s over 1200mph some 10km up.

It’s so advanced that the weapons system can recognise targets, rank them in order of threat and decide what weapon it needs to use to combat them. Only then does it notify the pilot. I could write loads more about the plane. Even the latest helmet BAE Systems has developed is staggering in its capabilities. And yes, BAE Systems does admit that a lot of the technology they’ve developed could well have a role in road cars in years to come. Not so much the weapons systems, more the autonomous decision making. Cagily, they admitted they may already be in discussion with several car manufacturers.

I was told to put my phone away after I took this shot. No pictures outside the hanger except the ones Lee was taking (some of which had to be deleted because they showed a sensitive area of the plane in too much detail). Anyway, as you might expect, people who build planes also turn out to be quite attracted to cars.

With both the F12tdf and R8 outside most of the assembly hall emptied out to see what was going on. And yep, I did risk the wrath of security by blipping the Ferrari’s engine a couple of times. I was given plenty of encouragement.

Final shot. So, this or an F12tdf? It’s sort of a serious question as both are roughly the same power and price. Really. Made by Rosenbauer, BAE Systems’ airport fire tender costs about £400,000 and has about 800bhp courtesy of a whopping marine diesel.

Better still, it squirts 6000 litres of water a minute from its big cannon. They can only use that on big planes – small stuff (like a Ferrari…) would be blown clean across the runway. In a driving seat exchange program, I let them sit in mine if I can sit in theirs. Mine’s cool, but theirs is much cooler. It’s like sitting in a helicopter – you steer the big cannon with a joystick, surrounded by all manner of alien dials and switches.

So there you go. If you managed to get this far I hope you enjoyed it. The full feature is in the magazine now. I would say this, but it’s a good issue – not only for this, but there’s a cracking feature on driving some of BMW’s coolest, most valuable cars around the best bits of Scotland (wonder who wrote that?), plus Eddie Jordan interviewing Niki Lauda, a visit to the Singer factory and Matt, Rory and Chris picking their dream cars. All good.

To read the full feature, pick up a copy of new Top Gear magazine