Enzo

FERRARI AND MOST of the rest of the world is now emerging, cautiously, from lockdown. Motorsport is embracing a shortened season without spectators, motor shows are trying to adapt, and car makers are finding new processes for getting writers into new cars… In this issue we bring you a first drive of the wonderful F8 Spider from here in the UK (which works well for us) and we’ve also driven the SF90 Stradale in Italy. In each case, new procedures and protocols had to be followed, but it felt so good to be back behind the wheel of some brilliant new Ferraris that no one minded a bit. Covid-19 means that many aspects of our lives will be changed for some time yet, some perhaps for ever, and I’m saddened…

‘It had been the longest ever disruption to production in Ferrari’s 73-year history’ A FERRARI MONZA SP2 leaving the production line wouldn’t normally be a harbinger of normality, but in a strange way that’s just what the limited-run, ¤1.6m roadster represented for Ferrari employees. The Monza (above) had been hours from being finished when Ferrari announced the suspension of production due to Covid-19 on Saturday March 14, and so it sat untouched on the Special Series line for seven weeks until production finally resumed on Monday May 4 under Ferrari’s Back on Track initiative. It had been the longest ever disruption to Ferrari production in the company’s 73-year history, and the restart came three weeks later than the originally planned April 14 date, which coincided with the peak in Italy’s…

IN MID-JUNE, Ferrari sent a further signal that some normality was returning when Scuderia Ferrari delivered a unique dawn chorus in Maranello. In the Officina Classiche department inside the factory, which used to be the racing workshop, the F1 team fired up the SF1000, its current GP contender, and Charles Leclerc drove it out through the famous entrance and onto the public road. With the approval of the local council, he then drove the short distance to the Fiorano test track where Ferrari used to test all its F1 cars and where it still shakes down development prototypes of every new road car. Leclerc’s route took him past the offices where Scuderia Ferrari designs its F1 cars and past the Ferrari Museum en route to Fiorano. The test track is…

THIS MORNING’S PAPER warned of mass unemployment and of a surge in Covid-19 infections, and revealed that Scuderia Ferrari has got its sums hopelessly wrong and will begin the F1 season with an aero package that doesn’t work. Just another Wednesday, then. We’ve become so accustomed to receiving bad news that we’d almost forgotten there was any other kind, so it is a treat to be able to report that the Ferrari market is in decent shape, all things considered. The HAGI F, an index tracking the values of key collectable Ferraris, is up 15.19 per cent for the year to May – an astonishing figure given that every other HAGI marque index is in negative territory over the same period. That there have been any values for the folks…

1:8-scale FXX-K Evo by Amalgam The FXX-K Evo is no classical beauty, but few cars make a more dramatic entrance, and Amalgam has perfectly modelled every eye-popping inch of the bodywork – from the little canards at the front to the huge, twin-profile wing at the rear – as well as the all-business interior and the engine bay. £9670 | amalgamcollection.com Technical drawing t-shirt Arriving just in time for the start of the delayed 2020 season, this official Scuderia Ferrari shirt is one for the F1 fan who enjoys the battle between brainbox engineers as much as the on-track action. £65 | store.ferrari.com LaFerrari sculpture by Antoine Dufilho French artist Antoine Dufilho has added a LaFerrari to his ‘Sequential’ series, an ever-growing flfleet of landmark cars rendered using precision-cut, closely…

While the similarities between the new SF90 Stradale and the LaFerrari are obvious, the differences also need to be scrupulously observed. The LaFerrari is one of the elite group of Ferrari’s ‘special’ cars, the limited editions that only the brand’s best friends and most loyal customers stand a chance of being allowed to purchase. Whereas the SF90 is one of Ferrari’s regular production models, the sort available to mere mortals, and it comes with no defined production limit and a pricetag that, in most parts of the world, is less than half that of its illustrious predecessor. Yet the comparison is unavoidable, as is the proof of how fast the sharp end of the supercar game is moving. Just seven years after launching the LaFerrari – a car that was…