I drove 193mph four-door family Ferrari – it has supercar performance, noise and is set to annihilate the competition

FERRARI. Always trying to be exclusive, aren’t they?

Not satisfied with £300k starting prices, now they’re making cars the riff-raff can’t pronounce the name of.

This is the Ferrari Pur . . .  er . . . Puro . . . er . . . Purosomething.

Let me try that again.

Ferrari Purosangue.

Pronounced Pooro-sang-weh.

It’s Italian for “pure blood” or “thoroughbred”.

I’m not sure why they didn’t stick with the usual letters and numbers, or names of places.

But then again this Prancing Horse is very different to any we’ve seen before.

Because it’s an SUV.

Ferrari will probably cancel me for saying that but this is a four-seat, four-door jacked-up Ferrari with four-wheel drive.

Hang on, 4-4-4.

They could have called it F444? Or quattrocento quaranta­quattro.
Right, enough tongue twisters for now, let’s crack on.

Purosangue is much like every other Ferrari in that it is here to annihilate the competition, both in terms of looks and performance.

Which it very much does.

That bonnet bulges like Santa’s sack because it houses a monster 6.5-litre naturally aspirated V12 which thumps out 725hp and 716Nm of torque.

No turbos. No electrical assistance. Just old-school grunt to enjoy all the way up to 8,250rpm.

Supercar performance, supercar noise and supercar balance, which is quite remarkable when you consider it weighs two-point- something tonnes.

Ferrari has to thank British race-car team Multimatic for some serious suspension clever­ness here.

Yep, let’s big up British engineering in a Ferrari.

Trick independent active dampers react in 50 milliseconds to supply pressure when cornering and counteract body roll.

The result is unbelievably controlled and flat cornering.

The shock absorbers also smooth out broken roads and reduce the risk of a Tango Ice Blast ending up down the back of your neck.

Pure theatre

Because this is a family car, don’t forget.

Add rear-wheel steering, gear ratios from a 296 GTB, and ceramic brakes, and you’ve got proper supercar agility at your fingertips.

Now we come to the cabin. The rear doors are rear-hinged, electric and pure theatre, like a Roller.

But they need pop-out door protectors, like a Ford.

The four individual reclining seats are part-furnished with 68 per cent Alcantara. See, they do care.

The boot is 473 litres — not far off a Nissan Qashqai — and the parcel shelf can be stored neatly under the boot floor.

Fold the rear seats flat and you’ve got a load length of more than 1.6 metres. Practical. Versatile.

Bring your own furniture home from Ikea. Bet you never thought you’d read that in a ­Ferrari review.

Now let’s go up top to the business end. Mostly brilliant. But also a little disappointing for a car costing £313k.

We like the driving position. We like the chunky steering wheel paddles and big aircon controls.

We like the “twin cockpit” to keep your co-driver entertained. We also like Apple CarPlay embedded in the digital cluster.

But the PlayStation cross on the steering wheel to control it is too small to score a direct hit and has too much to do.

Much easier is the “Manettino” switch which unleashes the full supercar performance depending on the road surface — and your mood.

There’s Ice, Wet, Comfort, Sport and ESC off — and you can choose soft, medium or hard damping.

You’d go Sport and soft most of the time. But ESC off in the snow was a lot of fun.

So that’s the Purosangue. The name is a bit of a mouthful and the car is a bit of a handful. Just as a Ferrari should be.

But it can’t tow anything. So maybe it isn’t an SUV after all.

Coming soon to a Premier League training ground near you.