I USED to be scared witless to drive in New York City, and I considered myself a good driver too. I learned growing up in Boston, where people drove the way they do in Beijing now — regarding stop lights and one-way signs as optional advisories — and if you didn’t have quick reflexes and eyes in the back of your head, you wound up riding home in a tow truck. So why did New York make me panic?


Partly it was the car my wife and I drove then, a tiny, underpowered Austin America whose hood had a habit of popping open at high speeds and whose leaky distributor cap was mounted in such a way that the car would stall after going through a puddle. But mostly it was cabs, the way they cut you off, and fire engines with sirens, and crazy pedestrians darting out between parked cars.


You needed nerve to drive in New York, and mine was so lacking that before my daughter was born I needed to make a practice run from our home in New Jersey to New York Hospital, her scheduled landing place, just to be sure I could do it without an anxiety attack. There are stretches of upper Broadway that still remind me of that journey. That was my route. The Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive was out of the question.


I still live in New Jersey, and at some point about 20 years ago I realized that I no longer minded driving in New York. I sort of enjoyed it. I don’t do it often enough to be an expert. I’m not in the same league as my friend Bruce McCall, the artist and writer, who grew up in Simcoe, Ontario, but now lives in New York and takes a small-town Canadian approach to getting around in the city: he drives everywhere.


I can get around, though. I know how to cut across Central Park, and that if you take a hard right coming out of the Lincoln Tunnel you catch a little underpass that lops blocks off the trip downtown. I know that the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel is worth every penny in tolls, and that there is no good time to attempt the Cross Bronx Expressway. If you’re a cabbie trying to creep into my lane — sorry, pal, honk all you want — I will give you no quarter.


Unless I’m driving someone else’s $200,000 Ferrari F430. This week, in honor of the New York International Auto Show, and of springtime in general, and to see if a pure pleasure drive in the city was even possible, I rented one from an outfit called Gotham Dream Cars, which specializes in what are known in the rental car trade as “ultra exotics.” It was not my first choice, actually. I wanted a Porsche, in memory of Ferdinand Porsche, the great car designer, who died last week, or a Lambo — a Lamborghini. But they were all taken. Apparently people rent from Gotham Dream Cars for weeks at a time, even months, despite a tab that can be over a thousand bucks a day.


My friend Bruce was underwhelmed by my choice. He wrote in an e-mail that the “Fazzaz,” as he called it, “used to be a snarling beast,” but is now “kind of an Italian T-bird with a/c and an engine that doesn’t overheat at 30 m.p.h. or under.” He might have been thinking of the great 1971 Elaine May comedy “A New Leaf,” in which Walter Matthau plays an impoverished playboy whose Ferrari keeps breaking down because of what he calls “carbon on the valves.” A mechanic tells him never to run it under 3,000 r.p.m.


I seldom got mine over 3,000 r.p.m., and not only because of wimpiness, though there was some of that. The guys who dropped off the car took photographs of every inch, warning me that I would be penalized for the slightest ding, and as a precaution put $7,500 on my credit card before I even left the driveway. (The actual 24-hour rental was $1,160.60.) Driving into New York and jockeying through the toll lanes at the George Washington Bridge I immediately felt some of the old terror.


There is a reason you don’t see many Ferraris in New York. They don’t make much sense as urban vehicles. They don’t overheat at low speeds anymore, but they don’t like to creep.


(Driving in New York must have been more fun when there was less traffic, and for all the congestion we probably have Robert Moses to blame. The trouble with building new roads into the city is that people use them.)


Like a lot of sports cars the Ferrari allows you to switch between automatic and manual shifting. The automatic gear changes at low speeds are a little mushy; the manual changes, accomplished by means of paddles mounted behind the wheel, are smoother but a pain in the neck in the city, where so much else claims your attention.


The Ferrari also has a very hard suspension, great for holding curves at high speeds but murder on potholed streets and bumpy even on the upper stretches of the West Side Highway, where there are metal pavement dividers at far too frequent intervals.