The reverberating echo of the engine as I flash beneath a bridge at 240km/h is so fierce it seems like there's a Formula 1 car up my tail. Driving a Maserati MC12, a car louder than any DJ's efforts, is an intense experience.
I'd already looked it over, checked out its 5.1m length and ample air vents, heard its V12 fire up and fumble into a burbling tickover that threatens with 465kW.
I'd watched it howl down the straight of the outer, high-speed circuit of the Balocco testing ground between Turin and Milan,where Alfas and Fiats are honed to production readiness.
Now I'm inside, door pulled shut over the broad sill, strapped into a torso-clamping seat, ready to go. Just me and this barmy car. This is one of the best parts of this job, being entrusted with R6-million worth of 330km/h+ supercar and told to go as fast as I dare.
It tends to concentrate the mind.
Pull the right-hand gearshift paddle to select the first of six gears There's no clutch pedal, so I squeeze the accelerator and off we go. Into second as I join the long straight.
Press the pedal harder and velocity annihilates mass in this particular physics equation. I've no time to snatch third before the engine hits the rev limiter at 7500, the tacho's needle flailing.
Note to self: must change up at 7000rpm, give electronics time to think.
Or maybe I should stop trying to be Ferrari Formula 1 test driver Andrea Bertolini who'll be on hand later to show how it should be done and ease the accelerator during the upshift like a normal driver.
I try; it makes things worse. The engine goes all ragged. It's meant to be driven to death, to have the accelerator riveted to the floor. I'll just have to watch my timing.
Now there's a chicane formed of cones, a right-left flick to stop me trying for 320km/h all the time. Brake, brake, how can a car so fast slow so quickly? The pedal feels granite-solid, the brake pads must be munching the discs to powder and I'm not even pressing that hard.
Off the brakes, flick-flick through the curve in third, power out to the hammering howl of this minimally silenced V12 - fantastic. The steering is as solid, as free of slack or flex, as virtual-worldly in its lightness and lack of feedback, as the brakes.
You guide, it obeys. The MC12 seems to have no more mass than the photons that bombard a PlayStation screen.
For me, used to the weights and reactions and causes and effects of ordinary road cars, such ease of access to such huge speed (vital data: 330km/h, 0-100km/h 3.8 seconds, 0-200 in 9.9) could lead to a lack of respect for the forces involved.
For this is not a lightweight car, even though it's made of carbon fibre on aluminium sub-frames. It weighs 1335kg, about the same as a Ford Mondeo, but that mass X potential velocity means a helluvalotta momentum you don't want travelling in the wrong direction.
Confusing overlap
There's a sound reason for this attenuation of efforts, though. Yes, the MC12 is a road car - but only because 50 have to be sold within 24 months for racing homologation in the FIA GT class (two wins so far from the driver pairing of Bertolini and Mika Salo), the American Le Mans Series (including, in France, the Le Mans 24 Hours) and the new Le Mans Endurance Series.
The overlap of these championships is confusing but, for the FIA GT races, a carmaker has to have made 25 road cars in a year and prove it. This has been done, and 25 more will follow.
Endurance racing takes a lot out of a driver, which is where the reduced control efforts come in. Racing gives the whole project a point, too, as well as doing wonders for Maserati's image.
But then you discover what the MC12 really is, and it gets a little strange. For under its extended skin, the MC12 is almost a Ferrari Enzo.
The Enzo is a car with less of a point. It was designed to showcase some F1 technology, has a production run of 400 (car 400 to be auctioned in aid of the tsunami appeal) and costs less than the MC12, despite its extra tech and its godly, rather than merely saintly, badge.
But the Enzo, fantasy-fulfiller as it is, has never raced. Pity; judging by the MC12's showing to date it might have done well but to have Ferrari and Maserati racing each other in conceptually similar cars would not make much marketing sense, given that the two companies are under common ownership.
The wheel is just a wheel
The MC12, then, has a little less power from the six-litre engine, better pulling ability from low speeds, a less violent gearchange, steel brake discs instead of carbon-ceramic and ordinary suspension dampers instead of electronically adaptive ones.
Inside, instead of computerised readouts to the left of the speedometer and rev-counter, it has simple dials and the steering wheel is just a steering wheel. The Enzo's wheel has a starter button and controls for traction and stability systems but the MC12 has them on the centre console, next to the air-con.
This may be the roadgoing version but there's plenty of bare carbon-fibre and a solid wall behind me. Luggage space? None, have your valet send it on ahead.
Unlike the Enzo, the Maserati has a removable roof panel (nowhere to stow it in the car, of course) so the carbon-fibre structure has been braced and there are many more vents and grilles because the race version needs them.
Striking are the giant vents in the bonnet, thin carbon-fibre strakes spanning the gapes, louvres above the front wheels, giant meshed apertures in the flanks and a wide, half-moon hole in the tail - above the four exhaust pipes but below a great hoop of a spoiler.
Pulling donuts
Anyway, Andrea Bertolini is now about to show me how to take the chicanes - he reaches 280km/h on the straights between them instead of my feeble 240 - then donuts the MC12 in a haze of tyre smoke just for fun.
The enormous Pirellis are designed for this car, so how much each smoke particle costs is best not thought about.
And then it's my turn again. First on the high-speed circuit, willing myself to brake later and later, finally clipping a cone as I leave it too late. Then on the inner circuit, long straights linked by twisty sections more like real roads.
I'm hurtling down the back straight now, aware of a red rectangle ahead - a van on the circuit out testing? No, its part of a bank of bollards signalling a left into some curves.
Now I'll find out how late I can leave the braking as my heartbeat gets close to its rev limiter. The MC12, of course, copes equably. It's way ahead of me.
Into the curve again and the Maserati just points as I think.
There's no sense of momentum to battle, no need to "set the car up" for the corner. Flick, flick, every tiny adjustment of steering and accelerator having an instant, proportional effect, every gearchange near-instant, and, if I turn off all the stability systems on a tight bend, I can squirt the tail out as I power through the exit.
In someone else's R6 000 000 car.
- MC12 is short for Maserati Corse dodeci, by the way. It means Maserati 12-cylinder racing car and it's the first official Maserati racing car for a long time.
Not since the Cooper-Maserati Formula 1 car, last raced in a GP in 1968, has the factory been directly involved in racing. Wecome back!