MMy Ferrari Challenge Experience

[G.Irish]

W00t! Man that's great! Doesn't it change your perspective of the whole sport?

Well some things I kinda figured, others kinda surprised me.

So for instance, I've always known Ferrari gouges the living daylights out of their customers. Ferrari halon fire bottle: $3000. Off the shelf OMP full halon system: $800. Ferrari tow hook: $400. Front bumper: you don't wanna know. Set of ceramic brakes: $12000. Brake pads: $1800.

Then there's the whole thing about Italians being disorganized. The Ferrari North America parts guy just waltzes in around 10 or 11 and leaves early. Need parts for your wrecked exotic before then? Tough. One of the techs joked that to get that job one should polish up on the fellating skills. When they were gridding up the cars for the race the poor assistant 430 Challenge manager was running around like a wreck trying to grid the cars up and I'm thinking, "NASA grids up two or three times as many cars with no problem."

Something that was cool that I already knew is that racing is an activity revered above all at Ferrari. There is a 6 year waiting list for the entry level Ferrari (currently the 430) but you can get a street car right away if you buy a challenge car. That's actually what one of the newest customer at FoW did. It was some Jamaican dude, we've been joking all week about whether he'll run a Red Stripe paint scheme.

A surprising thing was how skilled the techs were. I knew they had to be pretty well trained to be able to work on all the high-fallutin' gadgets on the cars but these guys can build engines and weld and are pretty well versed in car setup. Glen (the race team manager when we did our first tour) would examine the tires after a session to see how they degraded with heat and how they were used. It seemed like there were a lot of really talented people out there. And even though its basically glorified spec club racing for rich dudes all of the techs really took their jobs seriously.

Another thing that was a bit surprising was that everyone was pretty friendly out there, none of the haughtiness you'd expect. I guess its because everyone there was about the racing, not the posing.

A pleasant surprise was that Lee from VIR was out there. I'm sure some of you remember Lee as the tall crazy old guy from pit out. He works for Grand Am now apparently.

It was a lot of stuff to digest, that's for sure.