Looking at the sheer power, performance and complexity of the astonishing new Ferrari F430, you do wonder when, or indeed if, it will ever come to an end, this seemingly insatiable quest for bigger, better and barmier cars that we suffer from nowadays. As from next February the F430 will become Ferrari’s cheapest and least-well-endowed car. Yet at £117,500 and with 483bhp you could hardly call it an entry-level machine. It will, for example, out-accelerate and have more power than the once mighty F40 which, not much more than a decade ago, was famous for being Ferrari’s fastest-ever road car.

But maybe Ferrari needed to up its game, needed to react, if only to avoid being made to look, well, a bit like Eddie Jordan does in F1 nowadays. Think about it: at the moment we live in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it world in which our automobiles must become faster and better by the hour if they are to sustain our attention. And nowhere is the rate of progress more ferocious than in the arena of supercars.

Hence we now have a production Ford that will easily top 200mph (the GT), a range of Lamborghinis that has redefined the genre over recent years and countless rivals from Porsche, BMW and Mercedes (not to mention McLaren, Pagani or Bugatti), all of which have seriously ruffled Ferrari lately.