Ferrari Factory Tour
Usually, the tour is only given to Ferrari owners who have booked at least 3 months in advance. I think the TVR had something to do with us being given the benefit of the doubt when I claimed that I owned two Ferraris and asked why my faxes had been ignored. We had to use all our persuasive charm on this one! That’s Mr. Maticciano, director of US sales, who arranged our tour. And our guide was Simona.
Sadly, photography is not allowed in the Ferrari factory. So we only have pictures of the museum and the entrance lobby to the factory, as well as pictures from outside the fences. The wind tunnel is very impressive, and we were given a lot of detail on the tour. The Ferrari gift shop was selling some smelly old Ayrton Senna helmet for $6,000. And some German Ferrari owner’s club was in town. They lectured us on how unreliable TVRs were so I laughed in their faces which seemed to annoy them a bit. The next morning, two of the Ferraris were being fixed at the factory since they wouldn’t start. The Germans were not very happy at us going past them again and again and again—we took pains to point out how reliable our car was—just in case they didn’t get it!
Buoyed by our success at Ferrari, we managed to get a tour of Lamborghini as well, in neighboring Sant Agata. Again, the factory is not open to the public, and as soon as they are done building a museum in September 2001, there will not be any factory tours. This one took a lot of persistence! And again, they confiscated our cameras before the tour. The one picture I did take (of the Le Mans cars) turned out to not show them because they are behind a pillar. It was from far away, anyways. There is a lot of construction going on with all the money Audi is throwing at this company. The cafeteria is very nice indeed. But we got the full tour and saw the marine engines being built as well as the prototype car as well as regular cars being serviced. They had everything there, from 3500GTs to Miura SVs to Diablos.
Then it was a quick drive back to the museum, where we were not supposed to touch anything. Sorry Enzo.
Carrying on that evening, we also managed to get onto the Fiorano test track. Since this entailed climbing over a fence, the Cerbie was not driven on the track. We did get into Schumi’s gym, and also saw a couple of Maseratis sitting under some covers. And there was an old warplane there as well! Wonder if it had a Ferrari engine???
