Ignition, a prod on the red button and the V8 explodes into life to settle on a busy, raspy idle note. First gear, a slight throttle input and the car takes off gently. Very cautious exit on the street, but in spite of riding 15mm lower than the F430, front end clearance remains realistic for real world use. In urban traffic, the car is amazingly smooth and discrete, as inconspicuous as a matte black Ferrari can be, although the slightest stretch of the your right foot immediately summons a loud response from the V8. In the tunnels of the Geneva bypass, it is very difficult to resist downshifting two gears and flood the surroundings in the glorious bark of the 4.3L: not politically correct, but resolutely enjoyable. The exhaust system is however well designed to keep the exhaust valves shut at semi-legal freeway speeds, allowing to cover long distances without risking deafness or tenacious headaches. Cruising gently along the sweeping curves of the A40 is near torture, better try to look cool on the shots taken from our chase car and bide my time until a nice cocktail of A and B roads brings some form of relief.
Damping is very firm and demonstrates the impressive rigidity of the shell, the car feels taut and composed, although it requires increased attention as the camber increases and can even slightly loose its poise on degraded asphalt. The 430 Scuderia is equipped with a damping switch located on the center console, decoupled from the settings and enabled only from the Race mode onwards, a feature added at the request of Michael Schumacher himself to offer optimal body control on bumpy roads like the Nürburgring Nordschleife. I unfortunately only understood its behaviour at the term of our test (I swear I’ll read the press pack in advance next time) as its function is a little bit unintuitive: it softens the damping, while one would expect that the more you tweak the settings, the more radical they get. On the perfect tarmac of French Nationales, corner speeds are as expected: completely unreasonable. To note, the fit and finish of this car is excellent in spite of the firmness of the damping. Not a hint of squeaking.
The new F1-SuperFast2 gearbox is unbelievably fast and requires a complete readjustment of your cognitive references, so strikingly fast upshifts are. A compelling synthesis between the swiftness of the best double-clutch systems and the sensational experience that only sequential gearboxes seem to be able to procure. The gears slam at each request of your right index, interrupting the thurst for a mere 60ms. With the Scuderia, a threshold has been crossed, this gearbox feels faster than the human brain. The gear is already engaged and the V8 has already resumed pulling strong while your cortex is still trying to make sense of the endless flow of aural and physical information. The sensation is unreal, an amazing showcase of a technical know-how that seems currently unique in the industry.
With its 150ms upshifts, the F430 was a reference for mechanical sequential gearboxes until the 599 Fiorano (100ms) was launched. The 430 Scuderia is in a class of its own. If these number seem artificial, reality is striking. Glowing superlatives and lousy metaphors can’t quite describe the experience when, 5 LEDs lit on the steering wheel rim and tacho needle rushing to the redline, your finger triggers this brilliant electro-mechanical flash. The acceleration, the shrieking V8, the controlled violence of the shift, and this satanic ritual that resumes without the slightest respite. Downshifts are just as good, with glorious throttle blips and the occasional race-style exhaust sputtering. The SuperFast2 system is without doubt a very strong point of this car, as much for its sheer effectiveness as for the thrills it brings.
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