When Too Much Ferrari Just Isn't Enough; A Ferrari improved upon by Germans.(News)

Byline: MARK VAUGHN

The German engineers at Novitec Rosso all came from the land that speed limits forgot. What we consider unfettered, wild-man speeding is just the way these guys get to work in the morning. So when they called CEC Wheels in West Los Angeles, the U.S. distributor for Novitec Rosso Ferraris, and asked where to test the reprogrammed engine management on their Modena using California's 91-octane gas, they more or less assumed you could drive 200 mph on a regular old freeway.

"I told them no, you can't do that, you're going to get arrested!'' recalled Mark Carrillo, CEC's Novitec manager for U.S. sales. "They said, `No, no, no.'''

The engineers wound up blasting around the Mojave Desert (the safest place Carrillo could think of) at 210 mph, which freaked out even the grizzled desert rats who live out there, and lit up the switchboards of every law enforcement agency short of the U.S. Coast Guard, with screaming calls about crazy men in extraordinary cars and "Please, fer gawd's sake, halp us!''

No fewer than seven CHP cars pulled the Germans over on Interstate 14. In a scene out of Smokey und das Bandit, they stuck to their original plan of pretending not to speak English. For a while. Ultimately, no one was arrested.

But it shows the extent to which Novitec makes sure its tuner cars work. How many supertuners know or even care that California gets 91-octane super (much less tune engines for that rating) while the rest of the United States gets 95? We like those Germans.

And we appreciated their work when we got to drive a Novitec Ferrari 360. We didn't go 210 mph in the Mojave, but we spent an hour going back and forth along Mulholland Drive, sticking to apexes and outgunning everything we saw except a real live Porsche Carrera GT (hey, it was Hollywood). The improvements felt incremental in every category, but you're the boss and you can choose what you want on your car.