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Our host is smiling broadly. ‘Now I take you to the wow room. Are you ready for it?’ Suddenly I feel the pressure to respond appropriately. I mean, what if I find it all a bit underwhelming? ‘Oh, that’s very nice,’ in a flat Home Counties murmur, might not be quite the response he’s hoping for.
And given our privileged access on this tour – including areas never before seen by a journalist – I’d hate to appear rude. ‘It has to be natural. Otherwise you ’ave to leave,’ he adds, chuckling. I need not have worried about a lack of excitement in Ferrari’s huge Endurance and Corse Clienti building . As we pad up the white staircase of the complex, opened on the Fiorano site in 2021, the upper floor reveals its treasures – and what treasures they are: too many F1 Ferraris to count, in two long rows, stretching away until the cars at the far end are all but impossible to identify. Instantly I regress to my 10-year-old self, pumping the hand trigger that controls my Scalextric Ferrari, belting out those raucous engine noises that echo around my childhood home. I don’t know about rude; this next hour could be just plain embarrassing…Click here to add CAR Magazine as a preferred source on GoogleThat slot-car F1/87 is there: Gerhard Berger’s mount for the 1987 and 1988 seasons, so simple, neat and laden with turbo-era menace. Jody’s 312 T4 too; Niki’s 312 B3 and Jean’s 412 T2 as well. And there are so many Schumacher-era V10s that I’m temporarily discombobulated, and can only stand motionless, emitting a quiet sighing sound like a lost puppy. The man from Ferrari smiles again and nods approvingly. I have passed the gatekeeper’s test. The wow room has done its thing. We are looking at just some of the cars managed by F1 Clienti. Incredibly, there are more at other storage facilities, tucked away, awaiting a lucky buyer or in long-term slumber. Any Ferrari F1 car since the 1970 season is eligible; older cars are treated as classics, and will be worked on at Classiche. But Corse Clienti is different, because these aren’t just museum pieces or artwork to be hung on the wall of some billionaire’s man cave: these cars are driven and enjoyed. The programme is a kind of informal, familial relationship between client and Ferrari: a relationship in which one party hands over large sums of money, probably over a considerable length of time, for many cars; and the other then allows that client to enjoy a significant and largely irreplaceable sliver of its heritage. The ownership and driving are undoubtedly the bedrock of Corse Clienti’s appeal. But special clients also enjoy getting to feel like part of Ferrari itself. They’re no longer just a name and some numbers on a spreadsheet, but a friend of the world’s most famous maker of fast cars. All of which makes entry to these workshops like being given a temporary pass to some elite club. Federica Santoro is the head of XX and Monoposto Heritage programmes. Both of those sit under the Corse Clienti banner, as do Sport Prototipi Clienti , the Ferrari Challenge races and the driving school. There’s also the Club Competizioni GT under the Endurance racing banner. ‘We try to secure a schedule that allows them to drive as much as possible,’ she says. ‘We also take care of everything, so they can just show up at track.’ Santoro and her team organise eight events per year, from private trackdays to the Finali Mondiali bash at the end of the season. But as a client, you can also request a drive in your F1 car at any time and at any track in the world, so long as your pockets are deep enough. The huge Corse Clienti operation is a logistics juggernaut, able to transport your car, spares, supporting mechanics and even a world-famous driver of the car originally, such as Marc Gené or Giancarlo Fisichella, on demand. Need to get a hybrid-era F1 car to Laguna Seca, but can’t put its sensitive electronics on the boat? No problem, Santoro will have it air-freighted for you. Her boss is Antonello Coletta, who talks to CAR fresh from steering Ferrari to 2025 WEC glory in Bahrain. ‘We need to have the passion,’ he says, ‘because when the client decides to participate, this type of person wants to disconnect from the pressures of their world, and our event allows them to do that like a holiday, an experience with friends. After many years we know our clients and their families very well. The relationship is transparent. In other experiences there exists a wall, but with us? No. This is the secret.’ Ferrari’s special clients often begin with GT cars before making their way to the hallowed ground of F1 Clienti, perhaps using the XX programme as their route in. Begun in 2005 with the first, Enzo-based FXX, it’s been a real success story for Ferrari, and in the hall and workshops below us are rows of the Enzo-, 599- and La Ferrari-based XX cars, resplendent in a variety of extravagant liveries. While Ferrari doesn’t broker sales of used XX cars directly, it will help bring clients together, maintaining that control over the cars and that carefully curated clubby feel. Fewer than 100 have been built and sold over the past two decades. Looking after all these cars is a tremendous challenge and the responsibility of Filippo Petrucci, the head of the building’s workshop. His remit covers the XX cars, the F1, the Corso Pilota cars and the Sport Prototipi programme that covers the new 499P Modificata . Petrucci oozes passion for Ferrari from every pore, as you would both hope and expect. ‘I mean, it is an honour for me. As a child I was dreaming of most of the cars we have now in the workshop. To have the opportunity for me now, after many years, to handle these cars, to learn how these cars were made at the time, and to run these cars on track, is an honour.’ Petrucci spent 20 years working for the Scuderia before transitioning to Corse Clienti some 10 years ago, and that’s not unusual. Almost all of Corse Clienti’s mechanics and staff once worked on the Formula 1 front line, which means that when you ask for some set-up changes on your F310B, it’s quite likely you can discuss the implications of increasing the front spring rate with the same chap who had an identical conversation with Michael Schumacher back in 1997. Until recently, there were mechanics with CVs that stretched back to the ’80s turbo era, and their knowledge has been passed on through the team. ‘For us there is really no problem with running any of the cars; the most recent we have run is a 2021 car, and while we haven’t sold one of those yet, we will one day.’ So far, the most recent car to actually make its way to a client has been a 2018 SF71H, as driven by Vettel and Räikkönen. There is, I’m assured, no comparison to be made between running a Lauda car of the ’70s and something Vettel will have raced less than a decade ago. ‘With a ’70s car you do a quick checkover and then start it, all in 15 minutes,’ explains Petrucci. ‘You don’t even need to pre-heat the oil on those. On a recent car the oil must be warmed by an external heater to 80ºC, and then put into the engine so all the metals expand slowly, and the high-voltage system has to be at the right temperature. It takes two hours to fire one up.’ Maintenance schedules are complex and vary from one car to the next. Engines, gearboxes and other components will have certain mileage limits beyond which they must be checked, and engines get fresh oil after every outing. The oil is drained after each run and the cars stored ‘empty’. While the later cars are much more complicated, with the added hazard of high voltages, the cost-saving rules that stipulate engines must last several races mean they require less maintenance than the screaming 18,000rpm V10s, or the majestic 12-cylinder cars. Reducing the peak revs slightly helps longevity, too, although Petrucci cautions they can’t be driven slowly – that’s almost as bad for them as revving them too high and too hard, since it introduces harmonics at crank speeds the engines were never designed to run at. Those workshops downstairs are the nerve centre of the F1 Clienti operation. There are cars in various states of undress, racks of spare parts and an engine room where a V10 from the 2000s has been stripped down to the bare block, ready for assembly. There is nothing these artisans can’t do, and part of what makes the whole operation possible is Ferrari’s unique history as a manufacturer of complete cars, including chassis, engine and gearbox. It has the drawings for every single part on every single car, and if the spares no longer exist, it will simply make them afresh. At its most extreme, this came into play with a client who wanted to protect his race-winning engine in a Lauda 312T. Having been told there were no spares, he asked if Ferrari could make him a new one. It obliged, right down to using the same grade of aluminium as the Scuderia had in 1975, and casting the new block in their foundry at Maranello. I think I might need to leave before the excitement gets too much. I’ve already spent 10 minutes staring at a 312 T4’s gear linkage, lightweight and delicate like a bird’s skeleton, and the Clienti crew might start thinking I’m a bit weird. Fortunately, Filippo can relate. After we’ve agreed that the ’78 312 T3 is a thing of rare beauty, and that the early-’80s cars were perhaps peak F1, he says with a smile: ‘When I arrive in the morning and I come up the stairs and across the storage area to my office – and vice versa when I go home – believe me, I never, ever go straight through. I always look around saying, Jesus Christ, I am a lucky man…’
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