Dream Car Tour page 2
The 3rd car I drove would change my life forever, like nothing before. Except having a baby. But we’re talking CARS here, not diapers and sleep depravation! All of you have always imagined what it must be like to drive a real supercar, just as I have always wondered. You think, it will be so fast it will scare you. That you will feel more alive than ever, except if you were to pilot an F14 Tomcat at mach 2. But you and I never will, so lets forget about that. But you CAN drive a Ferrari F430. Is it like how I imagined? Well yes, I thought it would be better than I could imagine, and it was. It is like imagining having sex compared to actually having sex. Big difference, right? The Ferrari really overloads all your senses. It launches so fast that it scares you. First gear revs up to the 8500 redline so fast that the first few times you hit the rev limiter before you can shift. If I had to guess I would say 1st gear reaches 8500 RPM in .5 seconds and you’d better hit 2nd by then! 2nd gear is like most cars you have ever driven in first gear, in terms of the timing interval, except you are going over 60 before you hit 3rd. Like the M5, each gear shifts so hard it’s like you got hit 
with a sledge hammer. No manual shift car could ever shift this hard. The entire time the engine is 2 feet away from your head where the back seat should be, and it is angry. It screams, no, it roars, through each gear. Like a lion. In your ear. Paul and I never got over it and we would laugh with nervous excitement every time I would take the F430 through its paces. You can hear it in the video below, but the low quality camera we were using had a tiny pinhole microphone, so you can’t appreciate it unless you hook your computer to a home theater system and crank the volume to 11. The other cars I drove handled well, but they also were designed with a lot of luxury as well as performance. The F430 on the other hand is a zero compromise car. Unless you get into the million dollar range, like the Ferrari Enzo, there is nothing like it. (And I am not even going to think about an Enzo. That is like thinking about the F14 fighter jet. Despite the fact that an Enzo is a better performance car, I can’t imagine driving something better than this F430. It’s ludicrous.) When you lower yourself into the cabin of the F430, you notice you are sitting a few inches above the floor. The seats are super thin and the only padding seems to be the beautiful black leather that covers everything including the dashboard. I instinctively reached down to try to raise the seat. There is no such adjustment. The footwell is super narrow, since there is no clutch, but there is a dead pedal. The first thing you notice is the no-nonsense giant orange tach, and there is a good reason for it. You may have been taught to drive a manual shift car by listening to the engine, but not this car. You never saw a needle spin so fast unless you’ve played Gran Turismo. You have to pay strict attention to that tach because this car takes every bit of your reflexes. The speedo is to the right and you only need it when you pass a cop car, which we did, and we waved. Figure every cop is always going to spin his head like this guy did, when you drive this car. It’s just like when a squirrel walks by in front of my cat, on the other side of the glass sliding doors. Going back to the dash, you can see in the picture that it is designed with aircraft specifications.
with a sledge hammer. No manual shift car could ever shift this hard. The entire time the engine is 2 feet away from your head where the back seat should be, and it is angry. It screams, no, it roars, through each gear. Like a lion. In your ear. Paul and I never got over it and we would laugh with nervous excitement every time I would take the F430 through its paces. You can hear it in the video below, but the low quality camera we were using had a tiny pinhole microphone, so you can’t appreciate it unless you hook your computer to a home theater system and crank the volume to 11. The other cars I drove handled well, but they also were designed with a lot of luxury as well as performance. The F430 on the other hand is a zero compromise car. Unless you get into the million dollar range, like the Ferrari Enzo, there is nothing like it. (And I am not even going to think about an Enzo. That is like thinking about the F14 fighter jet. Despite the fact that an Enzo is a better performance car, I can’t imagine driving something better than this F430. It’s ludicrous.) When you lower yourself into the cabin of the F430, you notice you are sitting a few inches above the floor. The seats are super thin and the only padding seems to be the beautiful black leather that covers everything including the dashboard. I instinctively reached down to try to raise the seat. There is no such adjustment. The footwell is super narrow, since there is no clutch, but there is a dead pedal. The first thing you notice is the no-nonsense giant orange tach, and there is a good reason for it. You may have been taught to drive a manual shift car by listening to the engine, but not this car. You never saw a needle spin so fast unless you’ve played Gran Turismo. You have to pay strict attention to that tach because this car takes every bit of your reflexes. The speedo is to the right and you only need it when you pass a cop car, which we did, and we waved. Figure every cop is always going to spin his head like this guy did, when you drive this car. It’s just like when a squirrel walks by in front of my cat, on the other side of the glass sliding doors. Going back to the dash, you can see in the picture that it is designed with aircraft specifications.
Ferrari F430
The quality of the materials is evident everywhere, but unlike the Vanquish, it does not lean towards luxury – just pure function. Aluminum, leather, carbon fiber. I still get excited just looking at that picture above. To be honest with you, the exterior of Ferraris never got my blood pumping, although this may be the best looking Ferrari yet. Sure, it is pretty, curvy, sleek, pointy, and low. All good things, and this F430 is a head turner. However, for the ultimate sexy supercar, the Lamborghinis always did it for me. The Gallardo, which comes up next, is a way sexier looking and more futuristic car. Anikan Skywalker would only be seen in the Lambo, period. I always wondered why people loved these Ferraris with so much passion. After driving these two cars, my opinion of which car looks the most bad-ass didn’t change. However, the F430 wins as the better car. Most of the time you spend with a car is on the inside, and the Ferrari just has the perfect performance oriented interior. As far as performance, both cars are in the stratosphere and are so close you would need testing gear to measure the slight differences between the two. Instead it is the spirit of each car that leads you to the favorite. The Ferrari just feels a little more like a race car, it just sounds a little scarier, feels a little tighter, even though they would likely be neck in neck on a race track. Six days later as I write this, I remember every detail of the Ferrari, and that is the car that I yearn to drive again.
Paul Rosen is going to edit a fast cut little video from all the clips he shot in each car. In the mean time, since most of the footage I have is from inside the Ferrari, I made my own quick edit summarizing just the highlights of the Ferrari drive. Once Paul serves up his polished professionally cut quicktime, I’ll add it to the end of this article. I must emphasize that the video really doesn’t do the car justice. Videos always look slower than real life. However, the camera shake is real, and if you blast your speakers, then the sound is almost real. Note how during shifts the camera moves forward and backwards. The car is often going from 20 to 120 as the camera is rolling, so it was impossible for Paul to fight the G-forces. There are a few times you can detect the acceleration of this car – note how the fence by the shoulder of the road starts to fly. In the time that I would guess I was going 80, I would look down to see we were actually going well over 100. Oh, and then there was the time when I nearly killed the Ferrari. There were 2 factors that lead to this near catastrophe. The first is that you shouldn’t give somebody a supercar to drive for the first time and put them on the Bear Mountain Parkway minutes later. That is just insane. I didn’t know the limits of the car, and I hadn’t any time to get used to the fact that this car can seriously kill you, fast. The second factor has to do 
with the instructor’s carelessness with going over the features of this car. There is a dial on the steering wheel that adjusts the safety intervention features of the Ferrari. The first setting is snow. The second is full traction and stability control. The third is sport mode, which lets you get a little sideways before the stability control kicks in. The last is full out race mode. They didn’t tell us what that does, they just said to try it out if we want. Naturally, as soon as I got in the car I switched it right to Race mode. To see what happened, watch the video right near the end, when you see me cut the wheel drastically, in order to control a skid. I was too excited to think about what full race mode really was- well it turns off stability and traction control. My M3 has this too, but it is only noticeable during first gear. On the Ferrari, I found out that if you floor the car at 60 mph, in race mode, the rear wheels will break loose and they will attempt to switch places with the front wheels. Paul happened to be filming my hands at that moment. Watch near the end of the video to see me make some drastic course corrections and then burst out in the type of laughter that guys make when they almost kill themselves. This is the danger of giving a supercar, which is basically a race car, to someone who has never driven one, and letting them do whatever they want with virtually no instruction. Oh well, that is enough talk. Let’s drive!
with the instructor’s carelessness with going over the features of this car. There is a dial on the steering wheel that adjusts the safety intervention features of the Ferrari. The first setting is snow. The second is full traction and stability control. The third is sport mode, which lets you get a little sideways before the stability control kicks in. The last is full out race mode. They didn’t tell us what that does, they just said to try it out if we want. Naturally, as soon as I got in the car I switched it right to Race mode. To see what happened, watch the video right near the end, when you see me cut the wheel drastically, in order to control a skid. I was too excited to think about what full race mode really was- well it turns off stability and traction control. My M3 has this too, but it is only noticeable during first gear. On the Ferrari, I found out that if you floor the car at 60 mph, in race mode, the rear wheels will break loose and they will attempt to switch places with the front wheels. Paul happened to be filming my hands at that moment. Watch near the end of the video to see me make some drastic course corrections and then burst out in the type of laughter that guys make when they almost kill themselves. This is the danger of giving a supercar, which is basically a race car, to someone who has never driven one, and letting them do whatever they want with virtually no instruction. Oh well, that is enough talk. Let’s drive!crank your volume up first!
Coming up next, the Lamborghini...
Well, there you have it. Oh, by the way, I’ll take mine in red, just like this one. There really is no other color this car should come in.
