If motorsports is a religion in Maranello, the interior of the 430 Scuderia is a temple devoted to the cult of speed, with a superb combination of red-stitched suede and carbon fiber bucket seats covered with a mix of suede and high-tech textile called “3D”, optimized for breathing and grip. Down in the foot well, your eyes meet the laquered aluminum of the spaceframe; the carbon fiber pack, visible on another car, includes beautiful carbon fiber door sills, an alternative worth consideration. Ferrari’s Carrozzeria Scaglietti programme offers endless personalization possibilities to your taste (and check book), but the standard configuration is really pleasing to the eye and touch.

The bucket seats with adjustable back rest, available in different sizes to match your size, provide excellent support for my rather thin body frame, with precious lateral support to cope with the mighty grip of the car, and good lumbar support for longer trips to race tracks. Strapped with a 4 point harness, the driving position is excellent, your thumbs falling nicely on the carbon fiber, leather and suede wrapped steering wheel. The carbon fiber paddle shifters are at your finger tips, the blinker and windshield wipers are a bit too distant. In the center, on the left, the starter button, and on the right, the manettino and its five settings.

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.