Being somewhat of a motor sport fanatic, the name Ferrari conjures up all sorts of images whenever I hear it mentioned. Apart from usually being prefixed by the phrase ‘I’ll never own a’, Italy’s famous Prancing Horse-bearing manufacturer swirls images of passionate tifosi every September at Monza, of roaring engines screaming around race circuits and of deep red blurs flashing past on the motorway. Newcastle-based developer Eutechnyx (no, I don’t know how to pronounce that either) have cottoned on to the fact that having a Ferrari badge on the box may very well make a racing game rather popular, and hence here we are with Ferrari Challenge: Trofeo Pirelli.

Now, Ferrari’s adventures into gaming have been somewhat of a mixed bunch to say the least; Yo Suzuki’s SEGA-developed 355 Challenge still remains one of my favourite games of all time, giving players around the turn of the century a semi-realistic, rewarding handling model to get to grips with, whilst Enzo’s red cars have also found themselves burning rubber in many an arcade racer such as Outrun and Project Gotham. This latest effort very much aims itself toward the former rather than the latter, promising racing dynamics that have been – according to box blurb – ‘balanced to perfection’ by no less a man than hot-shoe nephew Bruno Senna.

First off, let’s deal with that point seeing as the handling is the heartbeat of any racing title. Y’see, as I have mentioned countless times now, I really, really enjoy a good racing simulation. Heck – I spent most of yesterday lunch (and some time after) perfecting my lines around Jarama in a Porsche on GTR 2. For those of you out there who really dig your racing simulations, the primary question you no doubt have in mind is whether Ferrari Challenge presents a worthy challenge for your skills. The answer?

Yes and no. The yes part of the deal is that, once you turn all the driving aids off, you do have to concentrate a great deal on balancing your car correctly, on braking at the right point and not locking the things up and sliding off the circuit, and to clipping each apex nice and smoothly. I even found myself hacking into a braking zone on my first few laps and hammering on the brake too early, leading to me having to release the thing again to discover that I was now carrying too much apex speed. To my mind, a good sim worth its cash should allows players to control whatever car he is driving relatively easily at lower speeds, but begin to really task him when he wants to take the thing to its limits. To this extent, the game succeeds. It feels great with a wheel too; hooking my G25 up to the PS3 allowed me to get some proper feedback going, and it resulted in a pleasantly smooth, accurate driving experience that punished me when I slipped up.

Where it doesn’t succeed so well are in the periphery ingredients of racing, such as opposition AI and, despite the claims of the box, damage. If you measure AI on how quick they are then, sure, Ferrari Challenge ticks a lot of boxes as you will spend a lot of time getting your arse kicked, but when it comes to duking it out with them at speed they tend to dawdle across the racing line, brake in suspicious places and generally follow themselves around in little trains. They do occasionally give you a good battle, mind, so whilst it’s not great, it’s not the worst attempt at opposition AI that you’ll ever come across. The damage, meanwhile, is something that you can imagine Eutechnyx having to constantly tone down under the wary glances of corporate bigwigs worried – wrongly – that having their cars virtually damaged will affect their mystique. Thus, bits will come flying off your car should you shunt in a particularly nasty manner, but they don’t seem to adversely affect the handling of your car in any way, shape or form, which is a bit of a downer to say the least.

If you’re not of the simulation orientation then the game does offer you a number of aids and a training school to get used to things with, so no need to worry that you’ll be dropped in at the deep end with no armbands. The driving tutorial itself is hosted by the legend that is Tiff Needell and will help give you a decent grounding in what you need to do in order to get up to speed as you complete two laps of Fiorano with him analysing what you’re doing, whilst having the option of ABS brakes, traction control and the like will put the stabiliser wheels on, allowing you to peel each one away the more confident in your abilities you become or, if you don’t want to, to have a slightly more comfortable gaming experience.

The general gist, though, is that Ferrari Challenge is very much a racing game that shines when you let it kick you about a bit, as strange as that sounds. For all the difficulty it will throw your way it never once seems unfair or random in the way it handles – you are painfully aware that it’s you who is making the mistakes, not the game. Thus, the sense of satisfaction when you do string things together and thread your way around any of the circuits in a relatively competitive manner is really quite something. It’s not as exacting as your GTR 2’s and your rFactors to the degree that you don’t really need to tinker with the admittedly deep setup options if you don’t fancy it, but it still offers a tough challenge nonetheless.

In terms of modes and challenges, the game does end up offering you slightly more than you might initially expect given that it is primarily based around the real-life Ferrari Challenge series, from which all the teams and drivers are present. The Challenge mode itself, during which you race a number of seasons based in Italy, Europe or North America, will see you driving the rather tasty F430 against similar cars on circuits such as Monza, Spa, Hockenheim and the ever-so-challenging Mont Tremblant. Progressing through each of the tournaments unlocks new Ferrari cars for you to sample in the Trophy mode.

The negative point to this approach is, obviously, that it’s a little clinical in comparison to the various career modes that pretty much every racing game throws our way nowadays. It’s a polished product, granted, and it’s very much focused on the core Ferrari Challenge mode, but you can’t help but yearn for some sort of progression that the game doesn’t really offer. Perhaps giving people a selection of the lesser Challenge teams to begin a career in and then gradually opening up better teams should you start bringing home the virtual bacon may have helped in this respect, and perhaps not having every championship open from the very start of the game could have given players a bit of added incentive to work their way through.

The aforementioned Trophy Mode is, save the Arcade and Quick Race options, the other main single player offering, allowing you to take any of the other Ferrari models you have unlocked into a series of their own races. These cars span a decent chunk of Ferrari history and include such gems as the utterly bonkers FXX (pretty much an Enzo on steroids, if you can imagine such a thing), the only slightly less mad F40 and some utterly gorgeous older open-top models and my personal favourite Ferrari EVER, the late 1960’s Ferrari 330 P4.. Everything’s been polished and chiselled into virtual works of art and are all a fun, if rowdy, bunch to drive around in, especially when you take into account that learning the way each car handles takes a decent amount of time.

On a similar note, each of the sixteen circuits that the game offers are pleasingly authentic, with the little touches such as the relatively recent Spa revamp all present and correct. Overall, however, the visuals feel somewhat lacking – the cars and circuits look just fine, but the surrounding texturing hardly blows your socks off and the thing is more prone to juddering than a Red Bull addict on a bouncy castle, which is something that rather affects the sense of speed you get. From an audio point of view the game has a pretty forgettable soundtrack but is bolstered by some fantastically guttural engine roaring when you’re brave enough to go in-cockpit for your racing, so big thumbs up for that.

Elsewhere, you are also allowed to tinker with your own livery with a very Forza-esque scheme creator and, bizarrely, also given some sort of random Top Trumps game you can play against the computer, but a few minutes spent being blatantly cheated by the artificial git with the other deck sucked the fun right out of that. Oh, and whilst there promises to be a 16-player multiplayer mode at some point in the future, but at the moment the thing is highly temperamental and seems to drop out at will. Whilst it’s going it’s excellent fun and there is a promised fix on the way, so we’ll let you know.

So, whether you pick up Ferrari Challenge boils down to whether you enjoy a more exacting driving experience and if you don’t really care for a more flashy, glitz-and-glam career experience. You can’t argue that at its core, the game presents you with a very rewarding, very solid handling model that’ll force you to concentrate more than pretty much matches anything available right now on the console market, but by the same dint you can’t also ignore the slight AI and damage issues that Gran Turismo games past have been panned for too. There was no way that Ferrari Challenge was ever going to appeal to the broad audience that Polyphonic’s multi-manufacturer colossus does, but until GT5 graces our shelves you could do much, much worse than taking one of Eutechnyx’s shiny red cars for a spin.