Ferrari Brings Back the Manual Gearbox — Sort Of
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Ferrari has unveiled the 12Cilindri Manuale, a limited-run version of its V12 grand tourer that does something no modern Ferrari has done in years: give the driver a clutch pedal and a proper gear lever. Except there’s a catch — there’s no actual manual gearbox underneath it. It’s all electronic.
The car still uses Ferrari’s 8-speed dual-clutch transmission, unchanged from the standard 12Cilindri. What’s new is a system Ferrari calls “Manuale by-wire,” developed in-house at Maranello, which translates the physical act of pushing a clutch pedal and moving a gear lever into electronic signals that tell the DCT what to do. Ferrari says the goal was to preserve the feel of a mechanical manual — including its flaws. Get the clutch timing wrong and the car will jolt, hesitate, or even stall, just like an old-school stick shift.
How it works
The gear lever sits on a mechanical module packed with sensors and kinematic hardware that mimics the clicks, resistance, and load of a real manual shift pattern. Two angle sensors track lever position, and if the driver tries to select a gear without depressing the clutch, the system physically locks the lever in place. The whole assembly is machined from solid blocks and weighs under 3.5 kg. Ferrari even tuned the sound the mechanism makes when it moves.
The clutch pedal works the same way — a position sensor reads how far it’s pressed, and that input is converted into hydraulic actuation of the DCT’s clutch pack. A spring-and-cam setup recreates the load-travel feel of a cable-linked clutch, so the pedal doesn’t feel like a simple on/off switch.
Drivers can run the car in full manual across six forward gears plus reverse, or flip to automatic when they don’t feel like rowing their own gears. Ferrari has also ditched the steering wheel paddle shifters entirely on this variant — a first in years — to keep the focus on the lever and pedal.
The engine
Nothing has changed under the bonnet: the same naturally aspirated 6.5-litre V12 from the standard 12Cilindri carries over, producing 830 hp and revving to 9,500 rpm. Ferrari quotes 0-100 km/h in around 3.0 seconds and a top speed above 340 km/h.
Design touches
Inside, the centre console, gear knob, and shift gate have all been reworked around the new hardware. The gear knob is backlit to show which of the six gears — and which mode, manual or automatic — is active. The shift gate itself is a deliberate nod to Ferrari’s old lever-operated manuals, dressed up with an aluminium tuning-fork-shaped panel that houses the controls and key slot.
Exterior cues include a laser-etched side badge and a pinstripe finish on the front splitter and rear wings, a reference to the Ferrari 365 GTB4. Buyers get access to Ferrari’s Tailor Made program for bespoke colours and interior trim, plus dedicated forged wheels and an optional livery designed around the six-speed theme.
The numbers
Ferrari is building exactly 1,499 units of the 12Cilindri Manuale — a figure chosen to reference the 1,499cc displacement per cylinder of Ferrari’s first-ever V12, built in 1947. As with every new Ferrari, the car comes with seven years of factory-covered scheduled maintenance.
Verdict
This isn’t a return to the manual gearbox — it’s Ferrari engineering the sensation of one on top of a transmission that was never designed to have a clutch pedal in the first place. Whether that counts as a gimmick or a genuinely clever piece of engineering will depend on how it actually drives, but on paper it’s one of the more interesting mechanical stories to come out of Maranello in years. For traditionalists who’ve been asking Ferrari to bring back the stick shift, this is about as close as they’re going to get. time to get that red glove out of the closet.
