Rumour has it that the...

Rumour has it that the Ferrari test drivers were lapping their Fiorano circuit as fast in an F430 as they had been in the Ferrari Enzo Ferrari hypercar.

As I finished my second lap in the 430, Schuey would have been completing his third

Surely some mistake? And I don’t mean because I’ve used the full and tortuous title for the model, named in memory of the company’s legendary founder, nor because I’ve reluctantly replaced the long accepted ‘super’ with the now trendy ‘hyper’ prefix. When the media talks of a teenager crashing their ‘high-powered sports car’, when it was actually an XR3i Escort, it’s clearly hyperbole. But I don’t see why we now have hypercars. I guess it’s because the supercar title has been so diluted over the years that anything which even looks a bit sporty has grabbed the tag. So, now we have ‘abnormal excess’-cars!

But back to the F430, or to be more precise, the 430 Scuderia. Please note, the ‘F’ is supposed to be dropped, and Ferrari gets upset about it if you don’t! My mission was to head back to my favourite part of Italy and find out if the rumour was true. The Scuderia brings Ferrari up-to-date in the ‘bragging’ stakes – Porsche and Lamborghini have already launched their GT3 RS and Superleggera ‘lightweight specials’.

However, while the competition only added ?25,000 or so for the privilege, the Scuderia is ?50,000 more than the base 430, so it needs to be pretty special. To be fair, the Scuderia is a lot more than a lightweight update. It’s almost a completely new car. The result is an extra 20 horsepower, pushing the V8’s output up to 503bhp, a loss of 100kg and much refined aerodynamic, suspension and transmission systems.

Yet, it still weighs only 30kg less than the Enzo, which has a 650bhp V12 in the middle of it. So the handling improvements would have to be pretty special if it was to outrun its big brother. Both Ferraris benefit from the firm’s grand prix-developed electronic traction control. The Scuderia has the latest version, with its different modes selected by the Manetinno dial on its steering wheel, but both have an ‘all off’ mode!

At the launch of the Enzo, each journalist could only do five laps – and had instructions not to turn the traction off – so if I was going to break those rules, I was never going to beat the record!

In that short blast of euphoria, I dipped into the one minute, 29 seconds bracket – nearly four seconds off the car’s ultimate pace, and half a minute slower than a grand prix car. Yes, as I finished my second lap, Michael Schumacher would have been completing his third. Now you understand just how fast a Formula One car is!

To be fair to the Enzo, the time that counted in the Scuderia would also have to be achieved in five laps, so it seemed like a tall order. But the tight, two-mile figure-of-eight circuit perhaps favoured the smaller car.

With the traction set on ‘Race’, the handling was virtually faultless and the traction control so good that I only occasionally felt the computers were holding me back.

Of course, with a system even more sensitive than Schuey’s right foot, a modern grand prix racer is actually faster with the traction control on. But I doubt this is so with the more conservative Scuderia settings – and my comparative times were to be done with everything off. The result – one minute, 29.4 seconds!

A real achievement that reflects the pace of progress coming from the grand prix world. In only four years, so much has been learned about chassis, engines, aerodynamics and transmissions – not to mention tyres – that a car of similar weight with a 150bhp handicap can now achieve the same lap time.