A Track Day At Elvington Circuit (Part 3)

This is part 3 of my track day experience, you can read part 1 here, and part 2 here.

I was due to drive the Ferrari F430 Spider convertible, but unfortunately due to timings I couldn’t actually make it for this one.  Instead though, I was offered the Ferrari Challenge Stradale – a lightweight, extremely powerful car based on the Ferrari 360 Modena.

The first thing that struck me about the Ferrari was the look.  It is an extremely aggressive car, being extremely low slung, with light weight wheels and a handpainted stripe along the length.  Second to that was how minimal the thing looked inside – it was as though luxury had been sacrificed for speed (though it was still amazing compared to just about anything else I’ve been in).

The flappy paddle gearbox was the next thing that grabbed my attention, as I had to use it to get the thing into gear!  The whole process was easy enough, and was soon as the ‘1’ showed on the digital display the instructor told me to “get it going” – which I did with aplomb.

As an almost exact opposite to the Lamborghini, to drive, the Ferrari was all screaming track fury.  Whilst the masses of power and sensation of roaring, terrifying speed remained the same, the gearchange however was completely different.  Instead of having to stick the clutch right to the floor, of course with the flappy paddles there was no clutch.  This meant that you could change up without taking your foot off the accelerator!

As a comparison, I found that the Ferrari was more willing to turn in to the corners and the lack of a clutch did make it easier to drive (the speed of gear change was also amazing), but I felt that overall I would prefer the Lamborghini on my drive.  Had it been a Ferrari with manual controls the story may have been different, but the Challenge Stradale is clearly one of the most devastating track day weapons ever devised.

My experience of the track day ended with an ‘instructor hot lap’ in a BMW M3 CSL – an experience that was absolutely brilliant.  I’ve no idea how fast we were going but given that most of the time was spent going sideways!  Perhaps the only disappointment was the noise of the engine – after the charismatic notes of the Ferrari and Lamborghini the CSL’s engine sounded surprisingly flat.

Overall, the Elvington track day experience was fantastic and I simply cannot wait to do it again.  Next time though, I’d quite like to have a go in the Nissan GT-R…