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Thanks: Promosale Ferrari SF90 Assetto Fiorano 2023 review – does the hybrid supercar make more sense on track? With time and space, Ferrari’s SF90 finally shows its true colours, but it takes the Assetto Fiorano package and some real dedication to find them. You need to get your imagination in the right place before attempting any kind of a quick lap in the Ferrari SF90 Assetto Fiorano. Because, to be honest, even just the idea of ‘pushing it’ in this car is a little bit terrifying. It does have 1000 PS (or 987bhp) after all. I won’t go back over its specification in too much detail here because we’ve already written about it several times previously. But the bits that matter most are as follows: it has one 4-litre V8 engine, two turbochargers, three electric motors and eight forward gears. It also has carbon-ceramic brakes, generates 390kg of downforce and costs half a million pounds as optioned. Oh yes, and it can accelerate from 0 to 124mph (200kph) in the same time it takes a McLaren F1 to do 0-100mph. So it’s quite fast. But according to our scales it also weighs 1742kg (Ferrari only quotes a dry weight of 1570kg). So it’s heavy as well as vein-detonatingly rapid, which means it also carries a fair amount of inertia around with it. Especially when you are pushing it. The accident you could have in the SF90 could therefore be massive and go on for a very long time indeed if you went off in the wrong place at Anglesey. Correction, if you went off anywhere at Anglesey. And by ‘pushing it’ I don’t just mean opening it up a bit down the straights and seeing what it can do in the corners, then timing it over a couple of laps against the stopwatch. I mean leaning on it hard enough to get a lap time that the eight-strong brigade of Ferrari engineers and PR people who are here today will be happy with. Given that they’ve turned up with a truck that contains three different types of tyres – including grenade-spec Cup 2 Rs that are good for two laps, and two laps only, they say – it’s obvious they aren’t here to muck about. More worrying still, they’ve got a simulation time for the SF90 around the Coastal Circuit that’s been established back at the factory on a computer. So they know precisely how fast it should go, assuming the conditions are perfect. And guess what, just for once at Anglesey, they are. The sun is out, the sky is blue, there’s not a cloud to spoil the view and… it’s not so much raining in my heart as pounding with a heady mix of anxiety and adrenaline-fuelled excitement as I climb aboard for my first timed run. I did some exploratory laps earlier on regular Cup 2s to try to work out what the car can do – and what I can’t. But that was just experimenting with it, to be honest. Seeing how much throttle it can take here, working out if it’s quicker to short-shift in certain places to avoid bonfiring the rear tyres out of certain corners – something it will do readily even in fifth gear if there’s some load in the outside rear tyre. And that’s despite it being four-wheel drive courtesy of the 200-plus horsepower that’s intermittently fed to the front axle via the electric motors whenever the car’s main brain thinks drive is required at the front wheels. Read More
