As I rounded the corner of a discreet housing estate buried on the rural fringes of a busy Cotswold town, my gaze landed squarely on this rather ominous specced Ferrari GTC4 Lusso. At first, I snapped a quick front and back portrait shot and thought nothing more of it. But once I got home, I thought, ‘This could make a great writeup.’ So I jumped in the car and went back out just to see it again. And here we are.

You see, the Ferrari GTC4 Lusso is one of my hero cars. But 4-seater Ferrari’s (bar the Purosangue) seem largely forgotten about. Often admired, but never purchased. As of 2024, there are only 196 GTC4 Lusso V12s registered in the UK, compared to 791 Ferrari 812 Superfasts. Both are front engine V12s, but the difference lies in the number of seats.

Perhaps it’s the use case. What does the plucky enthusiast do with a GTC4 Lusso? The original design principle of opulent daily driving and lavish cross-country touring gets annihilated by running costs rivalling those of a private jet on standby, and the younger, quicker, 2-seater V12 sibling is a more approachable weekend fling.

The GTC4 Lusso instead falls into a niche category – destined for a life of Le Mans and Swiss Alps trips, followed by a prompt sale. And I reckon this example is living that lifestyle with 23k on the clock. But that’s the romance that I love: this is a car that is designed to complement and blend in with its surroundings, looking perfectly at home purring through a Cotswold village as it would barrelling down remote autoroutes.

And I think the spec on this one helps. Grand Tourers should be specced in understated colours, the Grigio Silverstone Grey paintwork echoing classic Maranello-era Ferraris, where restraint spoke louder than flamboyance. Imagine palming this through a quiet Swiss village, GB sticker slapped haphazardly on the shooting brake rear, V12 humming away, waiting in reserve to downshift in a tunnel slicing through the Alps. Bliss.