Road Test
Ferrari 430 Scuderia
Test date 23 July 2008
Price as tested £172,605
For Sensational drive, brilliant engine and gearbox, straight-line performance
AgainstNoisy ride, brakes are tricky at low speeds, too loud for some track days
No car manufacturer has so consistently blurred the line between racing cars and road cars as much as Ferrari. In fact, Enzo Ferrari only began selling road cars (the first being the 125 S from 1947) because he needed the money to continue racing.
The Scuderia can trace its ancestry more directly to the one-make series F355 Challenge car of 1995. This race series morphed into the 360 Challenge, which in 2003 spawned the road-going 360 Challenge Stradale.
If we needed proof of its racing heritage, we found it at the British GT Championship recently, where we found ourselves in the company of a Ferrari 430 GT3. One of its engineers was answering our questions about its technical make-up until he found a rather more succinct description: “Basically, it’s a 430 Scuderia.”
Car makers are sometimes prone to overstate claims about their cars’ abilities on a circuit, but there should be no such problem with the 430 Scuderia. Outwardly it looks very similar to the regular F430 but underneath it has undergone a transformation aimed exclusively at improving its performance.
It is lighter and more powerful; it is meant to go, stop, grip, steer and handle with more conviction and precision than any mainstream Ferrari before it. In Ferrari’s own benchmark for performance, a lap of the Fiorano test circuit, it’s said to be as quick as the vastly more powerful Enzo.
So it is fast. But speed does not necessarily make a great road car. The question is: has Ferrari perfected the blend of road car and track car?
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