Ferrari F50
There are two things you should know
about the Ferrari F50. First, no one we know in all of the world has
measured its performance. Second, it doesn't matter if you're richer
than Ted and Jane; you can't buy one.
This is true. And to make sense of it, we slogged slowly through a veritable Ripley's fun house of politics, behind-the-scenes arm-wrestling, and lifestyles of the rich and famous.
So why can't you buy an F50 outright? Well, it isn't because all 55 of
the U.S. allotment has been spoken ton. It's because the whole passel of
F50s was offered only via a two-year lease whose various articles and
codicils were fashioned by Ferrari North America (FNA). Even if you
possess the requisite $240,000 down payment for the lease (not to
mention sales tax and luxury tax),
and even if you also are sufficiently affluent to swing the 24 payments
of $5600 per month, you'll still have to summon a $150,000 final
payment—again, two years down the cash-littered road—before you can
truthfully refer to yourself as an F50 owner.
According to Ferrari North America, this lease-it-or-leave-it scheme is
in place simply to weed out avaricious speculators—the quick-turnaround
artists who, you may recall, jacked F40 prices to as much as $1 million
when that car was introduced in 1988. Mind you, it has historically been
tricky even for Ferrari to identify those speculators. For instance,
whose motives for buying an F40 could brie truer or bluer than former
Ferrari driver Nigel Mansell's or, say, Princess Caroline's husband's?
Yet both of these customers almost immediately liquidated their F40s
into a stack of Euro-dollars slightly taller than Enzo's headstone.
Even if your savings account, gravy-wise, is relatively undamaged by the
$560,640 that you'll eventually spend on an F50 lease program, you
still may not qualify to wrap your sticky fingers around this
particular car's carbon-fiber shift knob. And that's because Ferrari North America will lease you an F50 only if you're on its "A list" of customers.
More hoops to clear? Fine. But how?
"There's this long questionnaire that Ferrari sent me when I first tried
to buy the thing," explains a current F50 lessee. "FNA makes you answer
stuff like, 'What Ferraris do you currently own? and 'How many
Ferraris have you sold in your lifetime and for how much? and `Have you
raced any Ferraris?' and 'Do you plan to race the F50?' And so on. If
your answers satisfy someone at Ferrari, maybe then your name goes on a list of guys they'll consider leasing an F50 to."
In the previous 13 months, C/D has spoken at length to 11 Ferrari F50 lessees. Most expressed annoyance
at FNA's questionnaire and leasing scheme. "I always pay cash for my
Ferraris," said one. "This time, I couldn't do that, so the car doesn't
feel like it's mine. Throughout all of this, I've felt as though
Ferrari was questioning my motives—me, a guy who buys another of its
cars every single year."
"I admit [the questionnaire and lease] were kind of a screening
process," says Ferrari North America spokesman Giampaolo Letta. "The F50
became something of a reward to customers who already had three, five,
ten Ferraris. We looked at the cars they owned. If they already owned an
F40—hadn't sold it to make a profit—that was important. But we [FNA]
did not decide who got an F50 and who didn't. That decision came from
Maranello."
Says longtime Ferrari dealer Rick Mancuso: "The [leasing] theory isn't
wrong, but the execution is painful. They [FNA] have controlled an
inordinate amount of the transaction on this car."
He's not kidding.
More than a year ago, when C/D first asked FNA if we could measure an
F50, it told us, "No, there is no press car." Fair enough. Not many
companies regularly hand out half-million-dollar machines to writers who
will thrash them on a track.
But a funny thing happened as we
began contacting the 11 men who had F50s parked in their garages. Either
they recited what sounded like a prepared FNA public-relations speech,
which always began, "Numbers have nothing to do with Ferraris. The cars are
about soul and emotion and a rich heritage." Or the F50 lessee
enthusiastically replied, "Sure, let's do it, where do you want to
test?"
Then, among those who said yes, one of two things would happen in short
order. Once we'd reserved a track and the test drew near, they'd stop
returning our calls and faxes. All contact would cease. That happened
four times. Or an even stranger response would manifest. The lessee
would sheepishly call to announce: "I'd still like to let you test my
car, but I can't. Ferrari doesn't think it's a good idea."
Well, okay. But why would wealthy, independent men care what Ferrari thinks?
Explained one: "I buy every new Ferrari that comes out. It was suggested that if my F50 got tested, I might not be on the list of preferred customers, which I think is necessary to get the first new models."
"There are perks for being a loyal Ferrari customer," said another
lessee who had initially been keen on having C/D test his car. "Things
like personal factory tours in Maranello and private drives at Fiorano.
Maybe I have a big ego, but those things mean a lot to me. So, to be
told I might lose those perks, well, you know. . ."
And that was the end of the discussion.
No owner was willing to reveal the name of a man at the distributor, at
the dealership, or at the factory who had uttered these intimidating
persuasions. So we asked Ferrari North America whether it had
recommended that its customers not lend us an F50. Replied spokesman
Letta: "It is true that we didn't want a customer's car to be tested,
because you never know what condition it is in, or how it has been
maintained. But Ferrari North America never threatened a customer."
We then asked Letta if any magazine had measured the performance of an F50. "No," he replied. When asked if he knew
why, he again said no but added: "I'm aware that [C/D] contacted some
customers who agreed to test. But [those customers] backed out when they
heard someone else would drive their car." In point of fact, however,
C/D offered each customer the chance to drive his own F50 during the
test.
In one instance, Letta referred by name to a Midwest customer who, he
said, "backed out because he wanted to drive his own car." This is an
odd statement, for two reasons. First, it was that customer's dealer who
called C/D and withdrew the car from the test. Second, that
particular customer, back in 1991, happily handed us his F40 to test
under identical conditions.
And so, 13 months and 11 American F50 lessees came and went, and the
paperwork in our F50 file began to resemble something akin to a Warren
Commission report.
Still, if there did exist some Oliver Stone—style conspiracy to keep us
from measuring an F50, no one had explained its purpose. The lone theory
ever posited, at least for publication, came from a dealer who would
only speak anonymously. "Understand that Ferrari, the company, has a big
ego," he said. "And the F50 probably isn't as fast as the F40. I'm sure
it would prefer this go unsaid."
Fast-forward to late summer 1996, and we're wandering the paddock at an
IMSA race. That's where we stumbled across a 45-year-old investment
analyst and heavy-duty trader of corporate stocks, bonds, and possibly
small countries. His name is Andy Evans, a crony of Bill Gates's. He
lives on a private island near
Victoria, British Columbia, and using either his three-engine,
ten-passenger Falcon DA-50 or his Lear, he daily flies to his office in
Mill Creek, Washington, or in Indianapolis.
Through Team Scandia, one of a dozen companies he owns, Andy Evans fields an unprecedented number of racing cars. Last year, for instance, Evans ran a CART Indy car alternately for Eliseo Salazar and Michel Jourdain Jr. He entered seven IRL cars at the
What grabbed our attention was Evans's easy-going, do-anyÂthing
relationship with Ferrari. In '94, sharing the 333SP with Velez, Evans
was voted IMSA's most-improved driver. In '95, Team Scandia's Ferrari
won outright at Sebring—again with Evans as one of its drivers. Velez
then went on to win the IMSA driving championship and, better yet,
Ferrari went home with the constructors' trophy. In Maranello's eyes,
Evans had become more than the Golden Boy; he was John Wayne with a cell phone.
"That [championship] was the highlight of my career," recalls Evans
during one of the rare moments he is not flying or cutting deals on the
phone or both. "And it must also have pleased Piero Ferrari, because
when I went to Italy, the factory said, 'As a reward, what would you
like? I said, 'I'd like the first F50 you make.' Well, I was a little
late—the first F50 was a beater, a prototype mule. The second had
already gone to, I think, the Sultan of Brunei. But the third was still
around, and Ferrari put my name on it. Chassis number zero-zero-three. I
couldn't believe it, because our [model] 333 race car was also chassis
number three. My lucky number."
As it happened, F50 chassis number 003 was never intended for U.S.
consumption. "It has European lights and bumpers," explains Evans with a
shrug. "But I don't care, because I was never gonna drive it. I just
wanted it as a colÂlector's item, a memento of our winning IMSA
season."
Indeed, the first time C/D clapped eyes on Evans's F50, it was parked 10
feet from his glass-encased office in the lobby of his
38,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art Indy-car shop—the word "mall" is
more accuÂrate—in Indianapolis. The car's odometer showed 50 kilometers
(31 miles).
Although its engine and drivetrain are identical to every other F50's,
chassis number 003 is in one way profoundly rare. It is owned
outright—no lease—by an American. Which meant Evans was free to do with
his F50 anything he wished. When C/D asked whether he'd let us run
numÂbers on his car at the TransÂportation Research Center's 7.5-mile
oval in Ohio, Evans asked only, "When?" and "Can I do the top-speed
driving myself?"
October 11: Andy Evans begins the morning in Gainesville, Georgia, where
(so the rumor goes) he is talking to Danny Panoz about a Le Mans
prototype. By noon, his two pilots have landed the Falcon in New York,
where Evans confers with sports-marÂketing guru Roberto Muller, his
partner in the duo's recent takeover of IMSA. By 3 p.m., he flies in to
Dublin, Ohio, and drives to the test track. He is preceded by one of
Team Scandia's Indy-car crews in a Penske-perfect 40-foot truck carrying
not only Evans's F50 but also a Jaguar XJR-15—strangely enough, that
car is also chassis number 003—which he has brought along because "I
just love hearing the sound it makes."
Evans is wearing a red Ferrari jacket, a Ferrari-monogrammed knit shirt, and a prancing-horse baseball cap that he does not remove. Oddly, he is not wearing the Ferrari F50 driving shoes that come as standard equipment with the car, stowed behind the right headlight. The baseball cap stays put until we ask, "You ready for a top-speed run?" Without uttering a word, he slips on his helmet.
Tutti in pinta! (Roughly translated, "Everyone on the track.")
Things are happening quickly. Evans warms up the F50's fluids, making a
couple fifth-gear passes in the 150-mph range. Lap number three is
deadly serious: 194 mph through both our timing lights and our Stalker
radar gun. In fact, the F50 is slowing only to 187 mph as it sinks deep
into Turn One on the track's steep banking. Evans isn't lifting, and one
of Honda's deer spotters stationed around the oval says to me, "That
guy is brave or crazy." As the Ferrari passes, its gated exhaust is in
the barn-door mode—inside the cockpit, it's at 104 piercing decibels of
shriek—and the sound comes as close to raising goose-flesh as anything
since the V-12 Matras lit up the Mulsanne.
On the fourth lap, the F50's speed drops to 191.6 mph, and radiator
coolant is fizzing out of the overflow vent. Evans stops. "Not exactly a
WSC car out there," he reports. "It dances around a bit, but it pulls
right up to the redline."
The F50's top speed is shy of an F40's by 3 mph. It is 8 mph below the
factory's claim. It's also 4 mph beyond the 8500-rpm redline—a cardinal
sin, except when the test driver owns the supercar in question.
During six acceleration runs, Evans expertly experiments with launch
techniques. The most efficient turns out to entail only a mild rear-tire
chirp at step-off, then lots of throttle. We view from behind; the
wisps of white tire smoke transform the car into a flying pink wing.
The computer spits out some amazing figures: A 60mph dash in 3.8 seconds. The quarter-mile in 12.1 seconds at 123 mph.
Evans's pilot turns and asks, "Is that as quick as most other
supercars?" I tell him that these quarter-mile times are quicker than a Porsche 911
Turbo's or a Dodge Viper GTS's by 0.2 second. They're five-tenths
quicker than the most recent Lamborghini Diablo coupe we tested. He
smiles.
On the other hand, these times are essentially identical to the F40's,
whose twin turbos made it more difficult to launch. In fact, once beyond
the quarter-mile traps, the F40 surpasses the F50 at every speed we
measured. By 170 mph, the older F40—despite spotting the F50 four
cylinders, 28 valves, and 35 hp—would be a full half-second ahead. More
than 100 feet ahead.
We move to the asphalt lake for braking tests, where the F50 immediately
wants to lock its front wheels premaÂturely. Without ABS, the F50
kicks up mini-puffs of blue smoke and is ever on the verge of creating
Flintstone tires. Evans practices, then squeezes out a dandy 176-foot
stop from 70 mph. Still, this is eleven feet farther than it takes a
Ferrari F355 with ABS to halt from the same speed.
On the 300-foot skidpad, the F50 easily holds an understeering line with
0.95 g of grip. Try to hold the tail out for a lap, howÂever, and the
car shows a predilection for oversteer that evokes a 180-degree spin.
This is the same lateral stick that an all-wheel-drive 911 Turbo
can muster, but it's a fair whack behind the F40's amazing 1.01 g. And
again, the F50's performance is shy of the factory's claim of 1.2 g.
More troubling, the car's rear tires, folÂlowing four laps in each
direction on the skidpad, emerge with a dozen dime-size blisters on each
inner rib of tread, this on a 60-degree day.
And so, we invested 13 months of frustration and a set of Goodyears into
conducting a 180-minute test on a car whose on-track performance
matched our original predictions almost exactly. Does the work-to-fun
ratio here sound slightly askew?
So far, the only Ferrari F50 offered for sale, free and clear on the
open market, is a Swiss car. Asking price: $608,300, or $47,660 beyond
what will be the vehicle's eventual out-of‑lease price in America. Jeez.
A price hike. A speculative spike? It may not make any difference,
because not one of the 11 lessees C/D contacted expected to sell his F50
once he owns the thing.
"Supercars, you know, there's always another one that's faster," says
Evans philosophically. "I could buy a McLaren [F1], spend twice the
money, go more than 200 mph. But to me, that's not the point. I think
Ferraris are the greatest sports cars on earth—I wouldn't race anything
else. I admit the politics of the company are sometimes difficult. Right
now, for example, I'm frustrated they won't conÂcentrate on the racing
version of the F50—get back to their sports-car roots, rather than all
this F1 emphasis. But I'm willing to wait it out. If they do construct
an F50GT, Team Scandia will buy one. I want chassis 003."
Meanwhile, the replacement for the F50, probably dubbed the F60, is due
in 1999. This time, if there's a lease, we're filling out one of those
ten-page questionnaires. There might be some fibbing involved.
Of course, when men deal in fast cars, isn't there always?
Source : http://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/ferrari-f50-road-test
