Ferrari 430 Challenge
Arrive and Drive for £3500 per day including fuel, tyres and insurance.
This is no ordinary Ferrari. It is a stripped down no-nonsense track-day beast designed for people who think the road going F430 isn’t as fast or as expensive as it could be. Just over 100 have been built and most were built to race in the Ferrari Challenge Trofeo Pirelli, a gentleman’s racing series.
Ferrari’s engineers have been to work on the car to boost performance and reduce weight so that the Challenge slashes 8sec off the road version’s lap time. The glass has been turned into plastic, metal into carbon fibre, and leather into cloth to save precious ounces.
The suspension, too, is stiffer and the car sits lower to the ground than the street-legal motor, while the state-of-the-art electronic differential has been replaced by a more traditional bombproof mechanical one, which is rewarding for the racers.
Around the bends it grips the tarmac hard, there’s no body roll, no spinning inside wheel, just a big helping of power that thrusts you from one corner and throws you into the next.
The car is fully kitted with F1-derived technology. The brakes are made from carbon ceramic material (known as CCM), are remarkable on the track, where they warm up quickly, they offer more feel, stronger stopping power and never fade.
