You must get your imagination right before attempting a quick lap on a racetrack in the Ferrari SF90 Assetto Fiorano. Because, to be honest, even just the idea of “pushing it” in this car can be a little bit terrifying. And by “pushing it”, we 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. We mean leaning on it hard enough to get a lap time that the Ferrari engineers and PR people can be happy with. 

It does have 1000 PS (or 987bhp) after all. We won’t go over the spec sheet of our own example in too much detail here because that’s what our website is for; just keep in mind that it comes with an expansive list of optional features (the Fiorano Pack is a £39,360 option alone). 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 when new. Oh yes, and it can accelerate from 0 to 124mph (200 kph) at the same time it takes a McLaren F1 to do 0-100mph. 

Around the Fiorano Circuit, Ferrari’s 1.86-mile test track, the SF90 is 7/10ths of a second quicker than the old record holder; the Ferrari LaFerrari, a car which currently changes hands for around £3 million. It’s 2.5 seconds a lap faster than the 488 Pista, and it’s 10.6 seconds faster than the F40, a car that made Enzo himself crap his pants from the passenger seat. Numbed by the Nurburgring as we are, the progress here may seem incremental: only 10.6 seconds in 35 whole years? But Fiorano is short. These improvements are staggering. 

As this is a hybrid it can offer a pure electric range of 18 miles if the battery is full, and just like in Porsche hybrid models, the car can charge itself. So you could hypothetically leave the city in pure EV mode, then switch to Hybrid or Sport on the highway to drive while recharging the battery, then switch back to a freshly charged battery once back in the city at the other end. It’s an incredibly effective system and lifesaving when you have concluded fast driving and realize you have a lot less petrol than you thought. 

One might argue that, in bringing hypercar technology and performance to upper-supercar levels of price Ferrari has objectively improved sports cars. Technology born in Formula 1 has trickled down through the exclusive LaFerrari and into a production series car. That you can get something faster than the LaFerrari for a way lower price shows unbelievable amounts of progress.