The mysterious magic inherent in the Divine Proportion was written at the beginning of time. Man is simply playing by nature’s rules, and because art is man’s attempt to imitate the beauty of the Creator’s hand, you can imagine we might be seeing a lot of instances of the Divine Proportion in art...
-The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown
‘The measure of your faith is the measure of the pain you can endure,’ the teacher told Silas.
Alright, you won’t know Silas if you have not read the Code. But you will certainly appreciate what the teacher said if you have been passionately following something in life. I know. I have been nurturing the ambition to drive a modern Ferrari for some time now. And you thought these things come easy, right? Just as you resign yourself to your fate, as your faith gets watered down, as your head starts drooping, comes the reward. In my case, the unthinkable happened on a fine morning, with a blast across the Mumbai-Pune Expressway in a Maserati Quattroporte to catch up with, ahem, a blood red Ferrari 360 Modena. Sure, the model has been superseded by the F430, but to me the appeal of a Ferrari can and should outlast the effect a mere model change can create.
Let me cut through the peripherals and get to the fundamental. How does it feel driving the Maser and the Ferrari back-to-back? Be honest and skip the following line if you are below 17. Driving the Maserati is like learning the art of love-making through a correspondence course. Good fun. Driving the Ferrari is like being molested by a bunch of Miss Universe contenders backstage. Dream come true.
The Maserati is complete, beautiful and perfectly formed. The Ferrari is sinful, stunning and chiselled. These are true-blooded Italian cars that reaffirm the one myth that we all want to believe in – that Italians make the most beautiful cars in the whole world. There is The Divine Proportion that you see everywhere in nature as explained very well in the Code again. And in front of me were two cars created the way God intended them to be.
The Ferrari interior reflects a lost opportunity with a dashboard that would have been all right in the San Storm. Panel gaps that tempt you to put whole hands in and glued-in monikers accentuate the fact that it is all hand assembled. But look close and you see unreal numbers on the large, white-on-black dials, you see the 8500 rpm redline and take a deep breath, you run your hands through the six-speed shiftgate and bite your lower lip, you see the 340 kph listed on the speedo and let out a sigh. You know you are moments away from a para-normal encounter. And before you know, you are hyperventilating and craving for the drive of your life.
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