2023 Ferrari SF90 XX review – Wings, power & speed

“Jump” isn’t a word you expect to hear while driving a $1.5 million dollar Ferrari around a circuit, yet I swear that’s what Ferrari’s test driver, who is improbably young and rakishly thin, has just said over the radio.

“Be careful over the jump,” comes his ultra-cool voice from the car ahead of me, the high-pitched howl of his own SF90 XX rising in the background. “It’s extra wet here”.

Spray is pouring off the back of his car, which unlike my scarlet red machine is a shade of brilliant blue, and despite his warning, the young test driver doesn’t seem to be slowing down at all.

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We slingshot through the right-hander that leads onto the bridge at Fiorano and I watch as he gasses it out the other side, the bewinged tail of his car shimmying for a nano-second before it rockets up the road. It’d be rude not to follow…

This is our first ‘hot lap’ in the SF90 XX Stradale – the fastest road car ever to lap Fiorano – and it’s also my first opportunity to go full throttle. Wary of the wet kerb, I get the car straight and flatten it. OH. MY. GOD.

The traction light blinks for a second but then BAM, the SF90 XX leaps forward, the electrified front axle clawing at the tarmac before the big 4.0-litre V8 chimes in like a sledgehammer. It’s ferocious acceleration, the kind that forces your neck to tighten and your knuckles to whiten, and then I hit the ‘jump’.

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Really it’s just a seam in the tarmac, an innocuous rise of a few centimetres as the track crests the bridge, yet the SF90 XX hits it with such velocity that it seems to take off.

The car goes light, the rear axle squirms and rages before it bites once more and the insane sense of acceleration returns.

What follows at Fiorano are five laps of extreme discovery. On paper, you could accuse Ferrari of rolling the arm over with the SF90 XX. Oh sure, this is the first time Ferrari has ever made an XX car that’s also road legal. Every XX before it – Enzo XX, 599 XX and the LaFerrari based FXX-K – have been slick-shod, track-only monsters.

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And yes, the SF90 XX does look obviously different to a regular SF90 thanks to that huge, downforce generating rear wing – the first ‘fixed’ rear wing on a Ferrari since the F50 — but power from the 4.0-litre V8 and three e-motors has risen ‘only’ by 22kW.

The tyre spec is also identical to the Michelin Cup 2s on the regular SF90 and despite a heavy focus on removing weight, just 10kg has been shaved from the XX’s total dry mass of 1560kg.

Then there are the obligatory 0-100 and 0-200km/h acceleration markers where the XX version is ‘just’ 0.2sec quicker than the standard car. Both are blistering, though… The XX will hit three figures in 2.3 seconds while 200km/h is chalked up in 6.5sec.

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One number that has changed dramatically for the XX, however, is the price.

A regular SF90 Stradale will set you back around $850,000 – providing you’re lucky enough to buy one, that is – but the XX is about twice that. Only 799 coupes and 599 Spiders of the SF90 XX will be made and each will carry a sticker price of $1.56m and $1.73m respectively. The Spider, incidentally, isn’t only more expensive but it’s 100kg heavier and two tenths slower to 200km/h.

Any notion the XX is a cynical money grab, however, is immediately and categorically banished when you drive it. This is a different league of performance.

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Because it’s raining, and the SF90 XX makes 1030hp (757kW), Ferrari’s mechanics have swapped out the standard-fit Cup 2 rubber and instead fitted run-flat Bridgestones to better disperse the water.

And from the get-go, the SF90 XX is far friendlier than an ultra-complex, aero-honed track car ought to be.

I once drove a Lamborghini Huracan STO on a wet Phillip Island and that experience was so full of glassy understeer and spiky, terror-inducing oversteer than I immediately wanted to return to the garage, but the SF90 XX’s initial handshake couldn’t be warmer.

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The steering is fast and crisp but not nervous, the front tyres are grippy and turn obediently, and the balance feels so benign and predictable that you find yourself relaxing after just a few corners.

And then it’s got you. Like a witch with a candy house, once you’re inside, there’s no escaping, and there’s a mind-boggling degree of performance to unpack.

The first thing to wrap your head around is the seemingly bottomless sense of grunt at your disposal. Outputs may have only risen slightly but the numbers undersell the changes Ferrari has made to both the 4.0-litre V8 and the plug-in hybrid system.

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The pistons, for example, are a new design and the V8’s compression ratio is higher.

The inlet and exhaust ducts have also been polished to boost airflow efficiency and there’s a different machining process for the combustion chamber. The engine itself is lighter, too, thanks to the deletion of the regular SF90’s secondary air system which saves 3.5kg.

Then there are the cooling improvements for the 7.9kWh battery that feeds the three e-motors (one for each front wheel, with the third nestled between the V8 and the gearbox) which allows it to deliver a 20 percent higher discharge rate. But the bigger change is to the software that controls the electric deployment.

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Dial in Qualifying mode and the XX automatically delivers 30 additional hits of ‘extra boost’ which last for 2.0 seconds on corner exit. Around Fiorano, Ferrari says this feature alone is enough to shave 0.25s off your lap time.

Combine all this and the result is a powertrain that feels wonderfully savage. Squeeze the throttle in any gear, at any revs, and the pick-up, response and rush of speed it delivers is mind scrambling. Need some context? The SF90 XX has twice the power of an F50 (1030hp plays 512hp) and its total output is almost identical to the FXX-K Evo.

Better news, though, is that despite the obvious complexity of combining three e-motors with a highly strung V8 and regenerative braking, it all feels wonderfully seamless. There are no clunky handovers between the engine and e-motors, no weird sensations as torque is shuffled from wheel-to-wheel.

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And because the XX’s intake plenum has been redesigned and moved closer to the cabin, there’s plenty of additional exhaust noise to enjoy, too.

The sound of the V8 isn’t objectively beautiful – it’s far from the lusty operatics of a V12 – but it’s urgent, angry and visceral. Then there are the gear shifts from the eight-speed dual-clutch which are whip-crack fast and have been re-engineered to deliver a sharper rev cut and ‘race car’ sound when you upshift close to the 8000rpm redline.

Power is nothing without control, of course, and the traction available — even on a soaked circuit — is mighty. The Bridgestones help (Ferrari’s pit crew call them “wets”) but mostly it’s down to Ferrari’s mastery of chassis electronics.

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The rain is falling hard enough to use ‘wet mode’ during my first session and the way the SF90 XX manages wheel slip and blends in the throttle on corner exit feels like witchcraft.

Out of Fiorano’s hairpin you can absolutely flatten the throttle and marvel at how the system perfectly increases the power delivery as you wind off the steering lock.

You need faster hands in Sport and Race modes – we weren’t brave enough to try CT off – with the latter providing enough latitude to understand the SF90 XX would be a proper animal without the clever systems. Not that I felt robbed of any excitement by keeping the electronics switched on, however: this car is intoxicating.

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I emerge from my first two sessions shaking, every synapse fizzing as if I’ve just hooked myself up to a mains supply of caffeine.

My brain is slightly fried, not just from the sensory overload but from the understanding that I've only scratched the surface. It’s easy to be cynical of ultra-expensive track cars like this, to dismiss them as out-of-touch exercises for the uber-wealthy, yet the SF90 XX has gotten under my skin in an unexpected way.

Further proof of just how much of a leap the XX is over the regular SF90 is provided by what it can do in the hands of Ferrari’s chief test driver, Raffaele De Simone. On a sunnier and far warmer day, De Simone hustled the SF90 XX around Fiorano to achieve an independently verified lap time of 1:17.309s. That’s 10 seconds quicker than an F50, and 2.4 seconds better than La Ferrari — that’s a lot around a small 3km track.

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The more telling difference, however, is how it compares to a regular SF90. Until now, the ‘standard’ SF90 was the quickest road car around Fiorano but the XX is a full 1.7sec faster.

Remember, the XX has the same tyres and limited extra grunt, meaning a big chunk of its extra performance is down to one thing: aerodynamics.

Ferrari says it ran more than 1000 digital and 150 wind tunnel configurations for the SF90 and the result is a car that creates more downforce than any road-going car Maranello has ever made. The huge, fixed rear wing alone makes 315kg of downforce at 250km/h and it works in tandem with a moveable section of bodywork below it that Ferrari calls a “cut-off Gurney” which can rise or lower automatically to vary the amount of drag and downforce.

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The rest of the car has been honed to beat the air into submission, too. The underbody is almost entirely closed off, the rear diffuser is a new design and up front there’s a larger front splitter which makes 45kg of additional downforce on its own.

The biggest change in the nose, however, is the repositioning of the radiators. In the regular SF90 the centre radiator cools the battery and e-motors and ejects its hot air underneath the car. In the XX, however, that central radiator has been inverted which allowed Ferrari to seal off the floor.

“This gave us a huge amount of downforce but it created problems because now we have hot air that exits through the bonnet and over the windscreen,” says Ferrari's head of aerodynamics, Matteo Biancalana. Ensuring that hot air didn’t make its way into the engine intakes “was a nightmare” according to Biancalana but the net result is a car that makes 530kg of downforce at 250km/h.

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The extra grip means Raffeale De Simone doesn’t need to touch the brakes between Fiorano’s fast turn 4/5 complex like he does in other road cars but is it something regular punters can feel?

On a dry circuit maybe but today it’s hard to gauge how much of the aero I’m actually exploiting. The fact that even I don’t need to brake between T4 and T5 bodes well and I’m sure I can feel some aero benefit through the fast sweeper around the back, but aero grip is a tricky thing to describe.

Something that’s indisputable, though, is the improvement to braking performance. The XX boasts larger rear discs and unique carbon pads but the transformational change comes via software, which Ferrari calls ABS Evo.

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It’s able to process more information more quickly, and more accurately, than a regular SF90 and it can also brake each wheel completely independently, which allows the driver to brake later and to carry more brake pressure into the apex.

The pedal itself is expertly judged – firm but with good modulation – and despite the XX’s tauter chassis set-up, there’s actually a surprising amount of pitch from the nose under heavy braking.

You can sense a whisker of body roll through quick changes of direction, too, which is enough to suggest that despite its track focus, the SF90 XX could trump both a GT3 RS and McLaren Senna for ride comfort on the public road.

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Ferrari’s clever 'bumpy road’ mode for the adaptive dampers and a nose lift are both available, too, though we didn’t get to venture outside of Fiorano on this visit.

So how to sum up the SF90 XX? With the light fading and the rain returning, I slip into the passenger seat for a final few laps of Fiorano while Ferrari’s test driver does the driving. It allows me to drink in some details that I’d missed earlier, like the naked carbon on the door cards, the lack of carpets, and how beautiful the metal throttle and brakes pedals are.

The whole cabin is striking, actually, in a sparse yet expensive way, though storage isn’t a strength – there’s a single cupholder in the central carbon spare and some small nets in each door.

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At least the seating position is brilliant, though, and the seats themselves – which are the lightest ever fitted to a Ferrari road car – are supportive and surprisingly comfortable.

The passenger laps also give me time to consider the point of the SF90. This is the first time Ferrari has made a road-legal XX car and needing to fit it with numbers plates has clearly robbed it of some of the extreme character you get in hardcore, slick-clad cars like the FXX-K and 599 XX.

Does that make it any less special? It’s a tricky question to answer – and a conundrum that plagues all ultra focused, tyre-limited road racers – yet as I watch Ferrari’s test driver oversteer out of the hairpin and then effortlessly pitch it into Fiorano’s fast, high-consequence left-hander, there’s no disputing the level of excitement and ability on offer here.

As a machine for delivering an experience, of translating the sensations and excitement of speed and grip and noise – even on a wet track — the SF90 XX is a masterstroke. In the dry, and on Cup 2R rubber, it’d be something else entirely.

2024 Ferrari SF90 XX specifications