I have come to believe that the most important hours in our atelier are between three and five in the morning. That is when the rest of Modena is asleep, when the air on the hills of San Possidonio carries no industrial noise, and when an exhaust note can be heard the way its designer intended.

We tune every Bamborgini exhaust in those hours. An engineer, a microphone, and a car with its valves fully open. It is not efficient. It cannot be mechanised. It is, I will admit, slightly absurd. And yet, when a client drives away from our atelier for the first time, the first thing they tell us — without exception — is that the car sounds like nothing they have heard before.

I sometimes think that is what we sell. Not the car. The evidence that someone, somewhere, cared enough to be awake at four in the morning.