Super high end sports cars like a Ferrari or Lamborghini are certainly awesome. My question is, why would anyone own one? You cannot really drive them anywhere and what good is going 200 mph when most of the time your stuck in traffic anyways and plus, every cop around would love to ticket you?
The only good about them is they look good in your garage.
Plus I read a column by Jay Leno once who said those cars are very fragile and super expensive to maintain. He did recoomend Porches though. He said they are expensive, fast, but built German tough and designed to be driven everyday.
So I’d like to ask, has anyone actually known someone who owns a Ferrari or Lamborghini? Did they ever actually drive it?
They look good stuck in traffic , too. And that’s important to some people, I assume.
Just 3 days ago, I pulled up at a red light, and in the lane next to me was a Ferrari.
You think I-and a couple other cars full of peole- didn’t stare at it? And the driver was clearly enjoying being the star of the intersection.
The funny thing is that, once the traffic light turned green, I popped the clutch in my 15 year old hatchback, and left him far behind, eating my dust.
Such sweet revenge.
(Each of us had one car ahead of us at the light, and when the light turned green, my lane started moving, and the car at the front of the Ferrari’s lane stalled.
Yes, I knew a guy who used his Ferrari as a client acquisition tool. He was a multi-level marketing millionaire and used the Ferrari to show off how much money one could make in his industry.
Years ago, when I was learning to drive, my driving instructor had a friend who owned a Ferrari. He told me a story about them taking the big magnetic “learner driver” cone from the top of his little car, putting it on the Ferrari, and parking it outside the test centre.
I worked in investment banking. I also work for a company that gave out a lot of stock options in the previous century as their stock climbed and climbed and climbed. The answer is “yes”
I know several people with Ferraris, ranging from very vintage to brand new as in less than a month old. One primarily owns a mix of road and race cars, with the competition vehicles being pretty high maintenance and the street going cars being less demanding. He also owns a recent ex-F1 car, which if I understand correctly, requires Ferrari techs to fly out whenever he wants to drive it as they will not sell the computer systems required to configure the setting.
Another guy that comes to mind has some vintage tags cars, but tends to buy the newer models on a regular basis. He drives the new cars regularly, and while they’re no Toyota I get the impression they’re not more difficult to keep up than any high performance car. By nature, they’re pushed a little closer to the edge of reliability.
A third guy that come to mind isn’t a collector, but an avid track day participant. He bough his couple-year old car and tracks it several times a year. I’ve also know him to do long road trips in the car, and the same story applies. More maintenance than a family sedan, but not fragile either.
I think you nailed it: Looks great in your garage but spends a lot of nights in your mechanic’s garage.
If that was a relationship, you’d kick them to the curb, AmIright?
No one I consider a good friend owns a Ferrari or other high-end sports car, but (IMHO) a large percentage of the people who buy them do so because they can afford it, and want people to know that they can. They are not car aficianados or motorsports enthusiasts, they just want to engage in some conspicuous consumption. In short, they’re showing off their money.
A smaller portion buy them because, in addition to being able to afford them, they do appreciate cars and the performance characteristics of these top-flight vehicles. They are likely to take them to tracks where they can hone their driving skills and begin to see what the cars are capable of.
Throughout North America, there are dozens of road-course race tracks where various car clubs and motorsports groups hold driving events almost every weekend. The events include high performance driver’s ed classes, time trials (competitions in which drivers go out on track one at a time, and best lap time wins), and real side-by-side races. Or just seat time, open time on track, not racing, with rules about where and how you can pass other cars.
For more than ten years, I participated in these activities, a few times riding in a Ferrari as a passenger, and on one occasion instructing a Ferrari owner (from the right seat). I’ve never actually driven a Ferrari, but they are fantastic cars.
Leno’s comments are basically correct, but most people who can afford to buy a new Ferrari aren’t worried about maintenance or repair costs. I suspect he was thinking about an average Joe, who might see that a 20-year-old Ferrari could be bought for a relatively low price. This guy would be much better off buying a newer Porsche, for the reasons Jay stated.
One of my coworkers is a close friend and has a Ferrari. Which he often drives.
He seems to buy and sell them about every 2 or 3 years. They’re always 10 - 20 years old. He puts a few bucks into them and sells them on. So for him a fun hobby with the faint whiff of maybe an occasional profit. And he gets to occasionally wring them out at an SCCA competition in addition to just tooling around the highways and byways on nice days.
He’s also got a daily driver & a ratty pickup truck. They’re each special purpose machines used for their respective special purpose.
Around where I live now there are lots of Ferraris, Maseratis & Lambos. Can’t go a day without seeing several. Plus Rolls and, for the wannabes, Bentleys. The drivers appear to be mostly show-offs; fat sweaty guys with big rings & bigger watches. Not my crowd, but they live near here.
Yes, I have known a dozen people who owned Ferraris. One even shared the last name of the brand, but no relation. I’ve never been in one. They are currently highly collectible, setting all kinds of auction records. Personally, I would never own one as they don’t do anything for me. Yesterday I went to the Behring Museum in Danville, California and they had even more classic Ferraris on display than usual, but due to renovation, fewer of everything else.
You can pay to drive your race car on a race track.
Way back when I knew a guy who had one as a daily driver and another as a racer. But then again, he also has several Duesenburgs and maybe a dozen other high end cars. When we were at drivers school together (for racing back in the early/mid 70s) his application, under occupation, had “born rich”. When he was born several relatives (grandparents, parents, a couple aunts and uncles) put roughly 2.4 million in trust for him and he couldn’t touch penny one until he was 21. By that time he never had to worry about working a day in his life. And being smart and raised to keep it that way, he still doesn’t.
To paraphrase Monty Python “they’re getting better!”
Speaking as a car enthusiast I see a lot of them as movable art - I came darned close to snagging a Ferrari 330 before prices of 60s Ferraris skyrocketed, and the appeal was solely the looks. My preference for something modern would lean towards the V8 Vantage from Aston Martin, also beautiful. For a serious speed fix, I’d spend a fraction of the money on a sport bike (BMW S1000RR) and sign up for some track days.
Yes, one of my husband’s frat brothers had a Ferrari as his daily driver. Actually, come to think of it one of the girl’s in my freshman dorm had a Testarossa (still pains me) as hers. He had paid for his, wrote a video game. Daddy paid for hers.
I now work in Silicon Valley and see them daily. Folks (looking at you Facebook) make some money on options and splurge on a car. The dealers track upcoming IPOs and stock up.
If I ever join the ranks of the money to burn crowd, I might be tempted. After the real estate and dressage horses of course.
I had an officemate once that collected cars and he had a 1980’s era Ferrari. He bought it for looks only. You would be shocked just how bad the performance of most 1980’s Ferraris really was (even humdrum modern sedans can beat them in most measures). Used Ferraris don’t have to cost that much at all. There are plenty on the market for $20,000 or even much less depending on condition and rarity. I have read articles about people that bought them just for fun and show and then sold them for roughly the same price a couple of years later after the novelty wore off.
I really close to a lot of New England Patriots football players. Some of them buy the newest Ferraris and Lamborghinis that I see in the supermarket parking lot from time to time. I don’t recognize them by sight alone most of the time but I have learned that any time you see a ridiculously buff black guy driving something like that in this almost all white area, it is a safe bet that he is a pro football player. They almost always do unnecessary courtesy cruises round the parking lot and then stop to give impromptu autographs. Somehow I think they are doing it because they want the attention.
You know someone who privately owns and drives a recent Ferrari F1 car? Like one of these?
How recent are we talking here? I have a hard time believing that Ferrari would part with a fully-functional F1 car from perhaps the last 10 years for any price.
And running it and maintaining it on a regular basis would require an ungodly level of support in terms of cash, custom parts, proprietary equipment, specifically trained personnel, and sustained, direct support from Ferrari. It would require far more than some techs showing up to flash the firmware.
Plus, all of this assumes that he has the mental and physical capacity to even pilot the thing. Or even fit in the cockpit, for that matter. They are not so much cars as they are two-dimensional jet fighters that never take off, placing immense loads on mind and body. Very few people have the ability to safely and effectively drive these cars.
A few days ago I saw an orange Lamborghini pull into the parking lot of the Twin Peaks breastaurant in Little Rock. So people who own them do drive them places. I don’t think it’s always about going the top speed. When I switched from driving a V-8 El Camino to a 4 banger Saturn I actually missed the acceleration when getting on 635 and 75 in Dallas.
To some extent I think that’s true of most sports cars and doubly so for the high end ones. My sister used to own a corvette and one of the reasons she hasn’t bought another one is because maintaining it was both time consuming and expensive. Somehow I doubt most people who own Lamborghinis or Ferraris are all that worried about maintenance costs.
I have never known someone who owned one of those vehicles. I know a few people who could certainly afford one though.
It seems implausible, but I gurantee if you are in the top tier of Ferrari collectors, they’ll sell you whatever you want once it’s aged out of competition enough to no longer be ultra top secret. In this case, it’s an ex-Schumacher Montreal winner from 1997.
If you google around you’ll see a recent case of a different guy managing to crack in half his F1 Ferarri at an event at Laguna Seca. These cars are out there, but you don’t see them much as they typically run in private.
