Driving a Ferrari Purosangue through sleepy St Mawes, Cornwall
Ah, Cornwall, the second home capital of England. Of course, the locals loathe the incoming hoards from West London and the home counties, breezing in for a few sunny weeks of the year with their 4x4s, yoga mats and Big Green Egg barbecues. Following the G7 summit held in Carbis Bay in 2021, an especially bright spotlight was shone on Kernow’s natural delights: its pirate coves and rugged cliffs and bucolic fishing villages. Everybody wanted to escape to the South West.
But the natives weren’t having it. Holiday home owner Gordon Ramsey was grassed up for flouting Covid rules. He, in turn, said he “can’t stand” the Cornish. In order to battle rising property prices, which has inflamed the rich-poor divide, Cornwall has doubled council taxes on second homes and holiday lets. As a result, many blow-ins are selling up and heading to Spain (a locale in which they are only marginally more welcome).
Which brings me to the Ferrari Purosangue. If the Cornish thought they’d seen the back of obnoxious SUVs DFL (Down From London), I ensured they got an earful of the loudest and most outré high-riding supercar in the business. But rather than further infuriate them by pitching up at a Ramsay-style Airbnb palace, I checked into the county’s most buzzworthy hotel, The Idle Rocks in St Mawes.
The Ferrari Purosangue: A true ‘pureblood’
The Idle Rocks is owned by one of Britain’s foremost motor racing entrepreneurs, David Richards CBE, the founder of Prodrive, a racing organisation and engineering group most famous for taking Subaru to multiple World Rally Championship victories. He has been a Formula One team principal, he’s been the boss of Aston Martin, and he currently chairs the governing body of UK motorsport.
As for Ferrari, Prodrive engineered the 550 Maranello that won the GTS category at the Le Mans 24 Hours in 2003. Richards actually lobbied for Prodrive to build some limited-edition GTS customer cars, but Ferrari refused. To be a Ferrari, it has to be built in Maranello, not Banbury. The car I’m driving west down the 303 and A30 is the right shade of red and hails from that hallowed production line. Purosangue – pronounced puro-sang-way – is Italian for ‘pure blood’, or thoroughbred. It’s a clever name, not least because it’s designed to wind up the Ferraristi who think it’s sacrilegious for the prancing horse shield to appear on a high-sided vehicle.
My destination, St Mawes, sits on southern Cornwall’s lush Roseland Peninsula at the mouth of the Percuil River. Unlike Padstow and St Ives, it has managed to escape overtourism. Boats bob in its tiny harbour, while hardy souls pad across the cobbles wrapped in towels, shivering from a wild swim. Today is grey and very wet, causing the sea and the sky to merge with barely a line on the horizon. The Ferrari would stand out anywhere, but it’s especially vibrant and otherworldly against this backdrop of rock pools, whitewashed fishermen’s cottages and thatched houses.
The Edwardian Idle Rocks sits prominently on the waterfront and has long been favoured by both artists and the yachting crowd. From the outside you don’t even have to squint to be transported back a century, when Man Ray and Max Ernst would visit. During the war, St Mawes was marketed as Britain’s answer to St Tropez. David and his wife Karen bought The Idle Rocks in 2010 and relaunched it to coincide with its centenary after a head-to-toe renovation. Karen was responsible for the interior design, which is in the New England beach-style: fresh, youthful and benefiting from the building’s natural light. Neutrals, blues and greys dominate, with pops of coral red and starfish orange. Driftwood sculptures abound, adding to the feeling of barefoot luxury.
It’s shoulder season, and the cosy log fire is burning. The kitchen’s focus is seafood, with local oysters, crab, cod and octopus starring on the menu. The view from the terrace and the bedrooms above is spectacular, even under tungsten clouds when the windows are being battered by sideways rain. These are the murky conditions under which one can imagine smugglers coming ashore. For those who wish to start their own rum-running operation, the hotel offers sailing lessons. At night, multicoloured bulbs strewn along the harbourfront illuminate, offering a safe embrace to sailors through the mist.
Ideally you’d come to St Mawes and not return to your car for the length of your stay. But when your car is a naturally-aspirated V12 Ferrari, and you’ve only got it for the weekend, you’d be a fool to spend too much time in the village queueing for a pasty and staring out to sea. Let’s deal with the question at hand: yes, this is a true Ferrari. It has a lot more in common with a hypercar than it does a Range Rover. Unlike the Lamborghini Urus, which is essentially an Audi Q7 with a bull badge, the Purosangue lives up to its name with its undiluted DNA. It’s also a lot more exclusive. Ferrari won’t reveal how many of these they’re building, but each Purosangue has a base price of over £360,000, and you can add an extra 20 per cent on top for what the average customer spends on customisation. It works out at about double the price of the Lambo.
For that, you get four seats and rear-hinged suicide doors at the rear, all-wheel-drive, and more boot space than has ever been conscionable in a Ferrari before. And, most importantly, the engine is a masterpiece, evolved from that of the storied Ferrari Enzo in the early noughties. Mounted mid-front for perfect weight distribution, it absolutely roars with 715bhp – 74 more than the Enzo). Other road users are swatted away like flies with even the smallest gap in which to overtake. Zero to 60mph takes under 3.3s and the top speed lies beyond 193mph. The smoothness and precision of its handling – aided by active suspension and rear-wheel-steer – blows anything else of this shape into the weeds.
A more sensible choice might be the Aston Martin DBX, which is almost as powerful and no slouch in the corners. And at £190,000, it would represent a considerable saving. It would also earn you brownie points at The Idle Rocks, given the Richards’ preference for the marque (David is particularly proud of his dark blue DB6 Volante, just like the King’s). But despite its enormous talent, the DBX doesn’t provoke double-takes in the same way.
The Purosangue is just the right parts aggressive and elegant; well proportioned; innovative in its aero without being nerdy; and, crucially, masking its girth so that it looks lissom and genuinely athletic. There are familial nods to other cars in the Maranello line-up: the SF90 at the front, the 296 at the rear, references to the iconic Daytona of the late 1960s and early 70s, and a vaguely Berlinetta shape. This was one of the most high-wire automotive briefs of the last half-century, and Ferrari have nailed it.
This is a supercar with added practicality, not a steroid-injected luxe load-lugger. Even if you took the prancing horse badges off, I’ll say this: it looks like a Ferrari, sounds like a Ferrari and goes like a Ferrari. Anyone with hot blood in their veins dreams of driving a Ferrari and, given that everyone wants an SUV these days, the Purosangue is, quite simply, the most desirable car in the world. Down here, tourists are tarred with the word ‘emmets’, the Cornish word for ants. If that’s the case, the Purosangue is the undisputed queen.