Luxury Insider - The Online Luxury Magazine

Our first taste of the new car comes on a calm Friday morning. Sitting in the pit lane of the circuit is an LP640 with a manual gearchange, which as we found out is quite a different driving experience from the one equipped with the extraordinary E-gear automated manual gearbox.

At this point, you need to know that shifting gears in an LP640 with a gear lever can turn your life into a nightmare if you are but an averagely-skilled driver. Having that gear lever means that there are the usual three pedals under your two feet; it also means you have to know just when to engage and disengage the clutch at the precise moment, or risk locking the differential and causing monumental oversteer - not much fun if you're engaged in battle up in the tight roads of the Alps at high speed. It would be best if you were already skilled in double-declutching, and you have good manual coordination between the gear lever and the steering wheel, without which your cornering is highly compromised.

Having said all that, however, the gear lever of a manual LP640 is simply beautiful; a sculpture in the middle of the cockpit to which your sight instantly falls and could happily stay for several minutes, speechless. It stands up magnificently on the center tunnel, made of strong steel, inserted into a fingered, open gaiter. And to hear that exciting clacking of steel against steel whenever one changes gear makes your nerves vibrate and you blood boil. It is an evocative throwback to Italian icons of the 1960s like Ferrari's 275 GTB, Bizzarrini's 5300 GT Strada, or the Maserati Ghibli.

The sensations as i leave the pit lane are a jumble between the roar of the V12 invading my ears and the emotion of the "landscape" of the cockpit: the massive central transmission tunnel, the large console which loses itself at the juncture with the nearly-horizontal windscreen, and the small steering wheel offered up to me from the steering column.