Watch a 986-HP Ferrari SF90 Stradale Break the Road Course Record at Indy
Along with hitting 60 mph in two seconds flat, it can zoom around IMS’s Grand Prix circuit without a problem.
The Ferrari SF90 Stradale is Ferrari's first-ever plug-in hybrid. It's eligible for a federal tax credit that will probably not be the deciding factor between dropping hundreds of thousands on the most powerful road-eligible Ferrari ever and, say, a Chevy Bolt.
The question isn't really whether you want an SF90 Stradale, of course. If someone offered you one, you clearly wouldn't turn it down. But do you want to spend well over half a million bucks on one? Even the people who have that much money are gonna need some sort of kudos beyond auto journalists thinking it's great. That's where things like track records come in, and the Ferrari SF90 Stradale knows all about that at Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s road course.
Ferrari has definitely been nosing around a few of the iconic times. Three weeks back, it was hooning an SF90 Stradale ’round the Nordschleife but nothing seems to have come out of that, so either it was preparation for a run or Ferrari didn't get the times it was hoping for.
At IMS, though, it’s struck gold. The Stradale's taken the production car record by a big margin, putting itself ahead of two race cars around the road course that gets run at the Indy Grand Prix.
The lap Ferrari has announced (and was independently verified) was a 1:29.625, with a top speed of 174.5 mph. It was completed during the rich Ferrari Racing Days by one of its professional drivers. Francesco Arati is a former rally driver who's never had a particular racing record of note but is the safe pair of hands to give a performance run to.
That's faster than the NASCAR lap record (1:30.522 in Ford Mustang) and only 3.2 seconds shy of the Ferrari Challenge record (1:26.386) which, given that's not a road-legal car and doesn't run road-legal tires, is a pretty small margin.
The Stradale's also been breaking records elsewhere. Over at Car and Driver, it broke the outlet's zero to 60 record, previously held at 2.1 seconds by the 2015 Porsche 918 Spyder since 2014. The Stradale beat that by a tantalizing tenth of a second to hit a solid 2.0. That is damned fast for a road car.
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