Running through hairpin corners in the Dolomite Mountains of the South Tyrol region of Italy, the Ferrari FF’s two-door wagon body style is the last thing on my mind, which is interesting because it’s probably the first thing anyone else would notice about the latest four-seater from Maranello. Instead, my most pressing thought, besides not dropping a $300,000 GT car off a cliff, is the FF’s four-wheel-drive system, which has so tamed the 651-hp V-12 engine that a tail-out hero photo of a drifting FF requires serious commitment with the stability control fully switched off.

When the back end finally does come around, though, it does so in a predictable, gentle manner. In Sport mode, the sportiest of the five chassis settings accessible via the steering-wheel-mounted manettino knob, the back of the car hardly wiggles on dry pavement.

But the first roadgoing Ferrari to put power to all four wheels doesn’t understeer like so many other four-wheel-drive sports cars—it’s actually mostly neutral through corners. Ferrari engineers repeatedly explained to us that the front wheels are used mostly for traction in bad weather and that power is otherwise shunted to the rear wheels as much as possible. Based on a cockpit display of power to the front wheels (which we were told won’t be on customer cars), however, that’s not entirely true, as the system activates on almost every uphill corner if you request full power.

Without the display, the only clue that the FF isn’t rear-wheel-drive is the aforementioned lack of oversteer. There’s no torque steer, no power-on push. And so it seems that the biggest compliment that we can pay to the FF’s groundbreaking four-wheel-drive is, paradoxically, that it’s not really a big deal.

What is a big deal, of course, is the FF’s body, a shape known to most of the world as a three-door hatchback or a shooting brake. The latter term dates back to the days of horses and carriages; in more modern times, it represents a sporty car in which a gentleman has enough room to carry his guns and hunting dogs. But Ferrari doesn’t necessarily prescribe a tweed jacket and a couple of hounds for customers (of which there will be about 1000 per year worldwide), seeing the FF simply as an evolution of the GT car with more cargo space and more mobility than its predecessor, the 612 Scaglietti. Heck, this Ferrari even has cruise control and cup holders. How’s that for progress?