Paging Dr. Ferraristein: Wrecked Exotic Goes up for Salvage Auction in Connecticut

It’s amazing what having a ton of cash can buy you these days. For example, if you have a tween daughter with big dreams to be on stage singing about her favorite Asian foods, up to $4,000 can buy her a music video featuring a clown in a panda costume, plus the music and lyrics.

That said, why allow your daughter to become the next big viral sensation (for all the wrong reasons), when for the right price, you can buy a wrecked 1995 Ferrari F50?

Read more
Is Ferrari Putting The Smack Down On "Cut Cars"?

Other than the AC/Shelby Cobra, which has been ineptly reproduced in horrifying bulk by various people up to and including Carroll Shelby, and Bentley, which for the past decade has been the unwitting target of a sustained global counterfeiting operation in which Volkswagen Phaetons are refitted with welded-up pairs of turbochaged VR6es and cross-eyed Kia Amanti front ends to make so-called “Flying Spurs”, no major automaker has been the subject of so much fakery as Ferrari. It’s not always as simple as Mister Twos pretending to be 360 Spyders. Some of the most controversial “fake Ferraris” started their lives as real Ferraris.

Now, a prominent Ferrari broker (and faker) says that the company is taking steps to prevent the sale of fake Ferraris, even (or perhaps especially) ones that originally hail from Maranello.

Read more
Vellum Venom: 2012 Ferrari FF

Jeff Sanders, my best friend and reason for this series’ existence, once said “Ferrari’s are the tits” for all designers. It’s true, as his immense skill received far more praise from the design boffins at the College for Creative Studies when he set his sights on a Ferrari instead of his beloved American brands. But tits for all (so to speak) changed when a friend gave me her guest pass to the Ferrari Club of Houston’s monthly meeting. Arriving in appropriate style thanks to my brother’s Testarossa, I chilled out with my Ferrari lovin’ gal pal. I also prepped myself for the Pimp-Mobile Testarossa jokes, often rehearsed by heavily depreciated Ferrari 348/355/360 driving bon vivants. It was a CCS design review all over again, to a lesser extent.

Then I opened the showroom door and saw my first Ferrari FF. Everything about this day changed. Won’t you join me for the rest of the story?

Read more
Ferrari Scales Back Production, Says No To EVs, SUVs

Ferrari will be scaling back production in 2013, in an effort to help retain some of the brand’s exclusivity.

Read more
Italy Cracks Down On Tax Cheats. Will Ferrari, Maserati & Lamborghini Go The Way Of Bugatti, Delahaye and Talbot-Lago?

TTAC alum Justin Berkowitz, over at Car and Driver, reports that a government crackdown on tax cheats has resulted in the Italian market for Italian supercars tanking. Ferrari sales went down 50% from 2011 to 2012. Maserati’s Italian sales have dropped 80% since 2009. Lamborghini is apparently selling no more than five cars a month in all of their home country.

Read more
Lamborghini Prepares Its Final Manual Transmission Model
With 2013 heralding the final year for the Lamborghini Gallardo, the supercar firm is also gearing up to produce its last manual transmission car ever. Road…
Read more
F1 Report: A Trio of Champions, A Threesome For The Champion

My rant about colorless F1 drivers of the 21st century may have been honored more in the breach than the observance this past weekend; while Lewis Hamilton was doing the interview with David Coulthard at the end of the race, champagne drinker Raikkonen was having a convo with race winner Alonso. When Coulthard asked the two men to share their conversation with the crowd, both of them declined, Kimi snarking a bit a bout “tires”, but the local camera director for the race coverage made sure you could see that Alonso’s stunning girlfriend had a friend with her. Or a sister. Or who the hell knows.

Anybody who watched it happen and still thinks the winner of China had a lot of extra room in his king-size bed last night is being willfully naive. To the winners go the spoils, and our trio of podium finishers each demonstrated why their teammates weren’t standing next to them when it was time to hand out the trophies.

Read more
Guns and Ferraris: Joe Biden Would Pry Them Both From Your Cold Dead Hands

Yes, I know that’s not a real Ferrari. The guns aren’t firing real bullets either.

So on Thursday, the crazy drunk uncle career politician who currently sits a mere heartbeat from the big desk in the oddly- shaped office without any corners went on MSNBC and said this:

It’s used to be, Joe, we were dealing almost exclusively with hunters. … There’s a whole new sort of group of individuals who, I don’t what the numbers are, that never hunt at all, but they own guns for one of two reasons: Self-protection, or, they just like the feel of that AR-15 at the range. They like the way it feels. They just, you know, it’s like driving a Ferrari, you know. So, my impression is, there’s not the same sort of cultural norm about gun ownership with a lot of people who are buying guns now.

Now we could (and probably will) get deep into the weeds in the comments section going back and forth about the nature of the 2nd Amendment in the 21st century and just how frightening it is that a man like Joe Biden could one day have his fingers on “The Button,” but I’d rather focus on the sheer brass of the VPOTUS and the underlying elitist mentality that shapes his world view.

Read more
Meatball-Themed Ferrari Aimed At Japan

Ferrari abandons its trademark red for a limited-edition version of the California 30 convertible targeted at the Japanese market.

Read more
Question Of The Day: Love The Car, Hate The Company

Steve Lang just asked the question, Which Car Companies Do You Not Like… But Respect?. That brings to mind a related question, sort of an inverse on Christianity’s love the sinner, not the sin, attitude. What car companies that you don’t like make cars that you do like? I’m pretty sure that I can guess how our friend Mr. Baruth feels about Porsche the company, but the guy owns three of Zuffenhausen’s best.

Read more
Ferrari Pricing Heads For Orbit, Porsche Stays Grounded

Ferraris are expensive, Porsches (usually) less so. This is something that every kid on the street knows, right? Turns out that it is, as the song says, truer than true.

Read more
Ferrari Shows Off Carbon Monocoque: Paris 2012 Live Shots
Kudos to Ferrari for having the audacity to show off their carbon fiber monocoque like it was a new vehicle introduction – which it sort of is, for the…
Read more
Vellum Venom: 1989 Ferrari Testarossa (RIP Sergio Pininfarina)

It was 1986. One of the cruise ship’s ports of call was Puerto Rico. At a local gift shop, a 9-year-old boy received his first “nice” car model, a 1:18th scale Ferrari Testarossa. He’d spend far too much time in his stateroom, with no lights but the small bedside reading light, turning the model while admiring how the light danced over the curves and edges of Ferrari’s most influential car: a World Car in every way. The vehicle that refined the Super Car. It defined a decade, and warped the minds of several generations of car enthusiasts. And it took this boy to a Motown design school, and eventually to a little car blog called TTAC.

Sergio Pininfarina once called the Testarossa “an exaggeration in flamboyance.” A fitting quote for what must be the most famous vehicle to leave his design studio. And while he might be right, compared to today’s flamboyant Fezzas, the Testarossa was veiled in understatement and modernist modesty.

So let’s dig deep into the Mehta Brothers garage, and check out Dr. Mehta’s 1989 Testarossa: a car we’ve wanted for decades.

Read more
Only In China: Prancing Horse Kicks Prancing Horse. Film At 11

A Ferrari 458, followed by a Lamborghini Aventador were on an outing in Shanghai when a local horse riding club crossed their path. The Ferrari driver demanded the right of way with the tool commonly used in China, the horn.

The horse next to the Ferrari did what many Chinese would like to do: The horse kicked the 458 into the shins, hard.

Read more
The Duel

In the summer of 1989, I was ten going on eleven. The fastest car I had yet ridden in was probably my dad’s 535i, clocked by the CHiP at well over the tonne, a ticket which the patriarch of the family talked himself out of with a “Not bad, right?”

It was hard to say if I really cared about cars yet: obviously they were important to my dad, and I’d already learned to drive our Series III Land Rover at walking pace on the banks of the Fraser River, but there were new Pirate sets coming from Lego, and G.I. Joe had just released a barely-disguised SR-71 Blackbird for the Cobra forces. Sean Connery had joined Harrison Ford in a quest for the Holy Grail. A friend had just gotten the new, side-scrolling Zelda Game.

The world was full of simple distractions for a young man: Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, E.T. and Ewoks, Yop bottles filled with vinegar and baking soda, Thundercats and Space Quest III.

Then, one day, in the basement of a Ladysmith home, I climbed behind the wheel of a 16-bit Porsche 959 and the whole world changed. I was exposed to the founding tenet of automotive enthusiasm.

What? The supercar? Don’t be daft, I’m talking about arguing.

Read more
  • MaintenanceCosts It's not a Benz or a Jag / it's a 5-0 with a rag /And I don't wanna brag / but I could never be stag
  • 3-On-The-Tree Son has a 2016 Mustang GT 5.0 and I have a 2009 C6 Corvette LS3 6spd. And on paper they are pretty close.
  • 3-On-The-Tree Same as the Land Cruiser, emissions. I have a 1985 FJ60 Land Cruiser and it’s a beast off-roading.
  • CanadaCraig I would like for this anniversary special to be a bare-bones Plain-Jane model offered in Dynasty Green and Vintage Burgundy.
  • ToolGuy Ford is good at drifting all right... 😉