Category: Exotic Sports 
Price Range: £118,500 to £172,500
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.
This section should perhaps be renamed On the Track, for that is the Scuderia's natural habitat. And away from the speed cameras, other road users and forces of the law, it does things so far beyond the traditional realm of mere road cars on mere road tyres that even once you've experienced it, walked away, had a nice sit down and thought about, it still seems hard to grasp.
The least impressive aspect of its performance is its acceleration - and we're talking about a car capable of reaching 62mph in under 3.6 seconds. Even very sporting and well sorted road cars usually struggle to generate 1g in cornering force: the Scuderia will pull 1.5g. It will also summon up an equally extraordinary 1.6g under braking.
You might think the only way to extract numbers like that would be for Ferrari to make the car as stiff and nervous as a racing car and that driving it fast would be a heart-in-mouth experience even for very brave and skilled drivers. Not so. Although the forces the Scuderia will subject your body to can be deeply unnerving, it is in fact a rather easy car to drive fast once you've become acclimatised to its ferocious powers. In fact if it has a fault, it may just be that it's a little too easy.
Like the F430, the 430 Scuderia has a manettino controller on the wheel, a five-position switch which offers different strategies for the suspension, differential, and traction and stability control systems. The Scuderia's has been retuned using the same basic algorithm used by Ferrari's Formula 1 gearboxes. This means that in position three, called Race and recommended for track work, you can be half way around a tight bend and jump as hard as you can on the throttle. Instead of throwing you into the scenery as your cack-handed driving deserves, it will simply pour as much power into the rear tyres as they can cope with and not one scrap more. There's no sense of any interruption to the power flow, nor any attempt to slow you down. It simply applies the throttle in the same way as you'd have done had God given you rather more talent in this department.
Any normal driver will be slower and more at risk with the traction control turned off, while even Ferrari's own test drivers struggle to go quicker without the aid of the traction control. Only Michael Schumacher is faster with traction turned off, and then by just 0.3sec.
By rights, a car this quick on the track should be near enough undriveable on the road, but this is not how it transpires. Although the car has been conceived and developed as a no-compromise speed machine, Ferrari has rightly recognised that a car with denture-dislodging suspension is not only going to be pretty horrible to drive on the road, it's going to be slow too. So a senior member of staff, one M Schumacher to be precise, suggested that a soft damper switch be fitted. The result is a car that is if anything more impressive cross country than around a track.
If you're sane and the road is dry, you're never going to get near the limit either in the corners or under braking, but the joy of being cannoned out of a second-gear hairpin and then throwing gear after gear at the insatiable engine is one of the rarest treats the motoring world affords today. Truly, it is a landmark of road-car performance.
