The first thing that grabs you by the throat is the sheer artistry and line. Sure, Pininfarina Ferraris have almost always looked good, but it's only when tiptoeing round this urbane and supremely elegant device that you come to realise the F430 Coupé is as close to a civilised, well-finished, two-seater F1 car as you can get.Lithe, low and smooth, the body clothes and softens the brutality of the massive front air intakes and lip spoilers, and those diffusers under the tail. The power plant lurks under a glass panel behind the seats the brand new, lightweight 4308cc V8 unit is actually located well down in the chassis and you can't really see it from the top.What you do see are the crackle-red covers of the plenum chambers on top of the long intake stacks, which reprise the original Testa Rossa cam covers and simply shout "Ferrari". Little details catch your eye, too - the wing mirrors, for example, outrigged on twin mounting arms which act at speed to channel airflow directly into the engine intakes.Massive ventilated millstones of carbon ceramic seem to fill the insides of the huge 19" wheels, together with the enormous six-pot front calipers in bright Ferrari red. The brakes were developed as part of Ferrari's Grand Prix programme, and the links with that side of the factory are more and more apparent as you go through the specification of the car.Take the manettino, as the F1 drivers call it. Adopted directly from F1, this red thumb switch on the steering wheel controls the suspension settings, the settings of the stability and traction control from the electronic differential (something Ferrari claims as a world first) and the speed of the clutchless gearshifts via the paddle controls each side of the steering wheel. You can set it for maximum grip on icy roads, for greasy conditions on open roads with the most comfortable ride settings, and in Sport, where the e-diff and CST (Control Stability and Traction) allow you to fully exploit the power.But beyond these three settings are two more. In Race, the gearchanges snap through even faster than the milliseconds they normally take, the suspension hardens up and intervention from stability control is kept to a minimum. And finally, for the exceptionally brave or foolhardy, there's a setting to de-activate the stability and traction control. You can use this for doughnuts in the supermarket car park or to demonstrate just how good you are at holding a 150mph opposite-lock slide. Or not.Switching on the ignition prompts a blizzard of lights on the dash as the systems check themselves over and pronounce everything OK. A muffled voice tells you "please to . . . " something I could never quite catch. Then you thumb the start button on the steering wheel, and a small bomb goes off behind your ears. With the featherlight flywheel the revs zap up and down in race-car style in time with tiny movements of the throttle.You settle back in the seat, using the power controls to find the best position. The steering column adjusts too, but the car is still seems built around the Italian physique of long body and short legs. You let the engine idle until the oil and water temperature gauges show a bit of life, then flick the right hand paddle marked "Up". The small-diameter, electronically-actuated clutch bites and the car gives a slight lurch to tell you it's in gear.Bring up the revs and off you go. The take-up is smooth but fast, the clutch wants to get fully home as quickly as possible and establish solid drive, so it can feel like a bit of a lurch till you get used to it. Any crack of throttle opening has you accelerating fast up to four or five thousand revs, and you flick the paddle to get a superfast shift up the gears.With the manettino set firmly on Low Grip (stability on dry and wet surfaces) until you get used to the car, the first few miles are a steep learning curve ride feels firm, a fair amount of feedback and rumble from the surface on ultra low-profile tyres. Some hints of tramlining on raised surfaces and white lines, but nothing too dramatic.At last the road opens out and you can explore a bit of the performance. While the engine is remarkably tractable, pulling smoothly from under 2000rpm without a hint of fluffing or hesitation, there's a marked personality change around the 4000rpm mark, and acceleration is positively brutal from then on. The red line is at 8500rpm, when an ignition cutout comes in, but in the lower gears you are almost there quicker than you can flip the paddle. Press the "A" button on the console and the transmission will do it all, backing off momentarily through the upchanges, and blipping on downchanges to match speed and throttle openings.The figures are of course prodigious: 483bhp at 8500 rpm, 465Nm of torque at 5250rpm, a shade under 200mph claimed as the maximum, and a 0-62mph figure of 4.0 seconds. You can't use anything like the maximum performance on the road, of course, but you rapidly realise on journeys that you don't have to grab overtaking opportunities. You can afford to sit well back behind people, and relax .With that much power on tap you plan where you want to be, and just go there.And there's the essence of the F430. There's so much grip, so much power that only a handful of very talented drivers could possibly exploit it to the full. If you can detect the fine nuances the manettino offers, then fine, sign up with an F1 team, where fractions of a second make all the difference. On the road it's irrelevant.But of course, well-heeled customers don't really buy this car for the roadholding and performance. Ownership is all really about the shape, the image and the sheer engineering excellence of the car, the pride of owning something handmade and really special, the membership of a very exclusive club. There's no escaping the reflected glory of driving the thing.It's a Ferrari - and that really says it all. The heritage, the mythology, the wonder and the worldwide worship of the marque is encapsulated in that one word. There's really nothing like it.
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