In spite of its silly name that almost beats LaFerrari, the Ferrari 458 Speciale is not a supercar that should be taken lightly, at least not according to its first review, the one done by Autocar’s Steve Sutcliffe. He spends some time with the car on both road and track and concludes that it’s better than the regular 458 in every way and quote, “will run rings around it.”

As usual, when it’s an exotic supercar we’re talking about, the many little performance enhancing changes that engineers think up really do seem to work; Sutcliffe appreciates the extra power, 90kg (198lbs) weight saving and excellent brakes that are reportedly the same as on the hybrid flagship.

It looks like a real hoot to chuck around, a trait we knew its less powerful and less special standard brother also possessed, but in this case, all the mods should bring that out even more so. All I can think about, though, is how they extracted 600-ish horsepower from a 4.5-liter V8, by adopting a crazy 14:1 compression ratio, while still keeping it civilized and clean enough for use on public roads.

By Andrei Nedelea

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