Imagine you’re an editor for FloralTrend , invited on a deluxe junket to Paris to experience a new species of water lily. You arrive only to discover your “experience” involves a dark room full of giant paintings of the flowers done by a mostly blind guy. All you can smell is linseed oil, and they all look blurry. The flowers themselves are just 45 miles away in Giverny, but it’s impossible to visit them. How will you accurately describe these Nymphéas to your readers?

That’s the conundrum our first drive of the 2022 Ferrari Portofino M presents. Ferrari’s pandemic product-launch workaround was to invite journalists, one at a time with a guest, to Miami and allow them to freely drive the 2022 Ferrari Portofino M unchaperoned for 48 hours with two nights pre-paid at a lovely resort in Key Largo. We were eager to go anywhere and drive anything, but the opportunity to sample the M’s myriad dynamic and sybaritic enhancements was particularly enticing.

Turns out, that wouldn’t be possible. Statistically, Florida is the flattest state in the union, and its roads must also rank as the least curvy and most traffic-choked (at least down in the Keys). The nearest great driving roads are way farther away than time and a mileage allowance permitted, and road circuits like the infield at Miami-Homestead Speedway posed a budgetary restraint at about $8,500/day. Hence, we were mostly constrained to trundling along in thick traffic on the heavily policed Overseas Highway.

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