Scary car, the Ferrari SF90 Stradale. One that’s been lampooned by all sorts of people in this business for being too complex for its own good, and too uninvolving to drive given it is Ferrari’s fastest and most powerful series production car ever.
This, after all, is a car with 986bhp and four-wheel drive. So despite the fact it weighs some 1742kg and is propelled by a fiendishly sophisticated (and not especially light) petrol-electric hybrid powertrain, at the end of the day it’s also vein-detonatingly fast. Not just along whatever straights you’d care to aim it at but around corners and under braking, too. And in the end speed, surely, is still a turn-on, is it not? Especially when served up by a bright red, twin-turbo, mid-engined V8 Ferrari?
For some, yes it is. But for others – for most of us here at Ti, I suspect – speed on its own is not enough to provide a thrill that truly resonates. It is not something that’s memorable in its own right. But in the SF90’s case the performance on offer is so huge, the speed it can generate so all-encompassing, you can easily walk away from this car feeling dumbfounded by it to begin with – although not in a good way. As if you, the driver, have had little involvement in the process of making it go, no matter how fast you may have made it go.
