Category: Exotic Sports 
Price Range: £118,500 to £171,494
Ferrari's fastest ever road car, utterly thrilling on the right road.
Liable to induce heart failure in those of a nervous disposition, extremely noisy.
The most exciting mainstream Ferrari ever made.
The photographs may make this look like an F430 with more zip, but the new Ferrari 430 Scuderia is something different entirely. We can prove it. The fastest ever Ferrari road car was the 650bhp Enzo of 2004, which was built entirely from carbon fibre, used a 6.0-litre V12 engine and presented a bill for £425,000 to 349 people on the planet lucky enough to be invited by Ferrari to buy one. All very impressive until you learn that this 510bhp Scuderia, fashioned largely from aluminium and powered by a 4.3-litre V8 motor, costs £172,500 and is quicker. You read that right. The ultimate arbiter of pure Ferrari speed has always been outright pace around one lap of the Fiorano test track and on this measure, however staggering it may sound, this standard production Scuderia has the Enzo licked. An F430, by contrast, would scarcely see which way an Enzo went.
There is no one secret to explain this monumental performance jump, no cannonball turbos lurking beneath the engine cover. Instead Ferrari changed everything on the car in the relentless pursuit of speed. It's 20bhp more powerful, and by paying extensive attention to all areas of its construction they've also been able to shave 100kg off what was already a fairly sylph-like kerb weight. There are carbon ceramic brakes as standard and a huge amount of aerodynamic work carried out on and, in particular, under the car. There is completely new suspension featuring, get this, titanium springs and a brand new Pirelli P-Zero Corsa tyre developed specifically for this car.
And then there's the gearbox. If you drive a car with a really quick gearbox and change gear as fast as you possibly can, you might complete the task from lifting off the throttle in one gear to reapplying it in another in a little over half a second. The paddleshift gearchange in the Scuderia does the same in 60 milliseconds, making it perhaps 10 times quicker, and you can't blink that fast.
What we are looking at, then, is not far removed from a street-legal racing car. It costs a lot more than the standard F430, which is currently £129,000, plus £5,000 for the F1 gearbox and £10,500 for the carbon ceramic brakes that are standard on the Scuderia. But if the £28,000 premium Ferrari is asking seems steep, after a day at the wheel it feels closer to a bargain.
