Ferrari tour beats BMW pork fest

Peter Bleakney

SPECIAL TO THE STAR

THE BEST

Without a doubt, the highlight of this year was my visit to Maranello, Italy as a guest of Ferrari. For a Prancing Horse greenhorn such as myself, it was an intense immersion, capped by a day of driving the fab 430 Scuderia.

No time for jet lag here. On arriving at the hotel, I was whisked off to the Galleria Ferrari Museum. Then an exclusive guided tour of the pristine Ferrari factory and Classiche Studio where the privileged bring their Ferraris "home" to be repaired and/or restored. The F1 operations were strictly off limits.

Even during the factory tour, we were moved along smartly, and received more than a few suspicious glances from the red jumpsuit-clad workers. At the final assembly line, where engines are installed and the cars are "born," our instructions were to keep videotaping to a minimum. At this most sacred of areas, hushed reverence seemed wholly (or is that holy?) appropriate as a mighty 611 hp 6.0 L V12 nestled into the prow of a 599 GTB.

The next morning's downpour made the mountainous test route an interesting exercise in restraint, it cleared up enough in the afternoon for an enlightening session at Ferrari's Fiorano test track.

Quite often, when a manufacturer hosts a track event, the journos follow a pace car (albeit at a good clip) around the course. Not here. Jump in the 430 and the track is yours.

Granted, three laps of the 2.9 km circuit is a skimpy count, but it was enough for me to appreciate Ferrari's claim that, with this highly technical and extremely precise lightweight special, a reasonably skilled driver can approach a professional's lap time.

Still high from the track stint, a Ferrari official called me over, unlocked the old red and white farmhouse, to let me spend a few moments in the perfectly preserved shrine of Enzo's private office – essentially untouched since his death in 1988. Mission complete.

THE WORST

This past year has been completely drama-free – no breakdowns, no speeding tickets, no cartwheeling Cayennes in Mongolia.

Okay. One day in Bavaria was not the greatest.

We were driving BMW turbodiesels over an extended route of bucolic pastoral blacktop and the autobahn. Comically, most of us got lost immediately after leaving the hotel due to a very unGerman-like error in the route book.

And my stomach wasn't feeling so good either. Kinda queasy, actually. Might have had something to do with the previous night's beer garden activities. Did you know the Bavarian diet consists solely of pig, suckling pig, ham, pork schnitzel, pork sausage, potatoes and beer? But I digress.

Merging onto the autobahn, I'm looking for the overhead signs that post the speed limits, and more important, let you know when it's okay to put the hammer down. Before I know it, a writer from the Globe blows by me.

We stop for lunch at this lovely lakeside resort near the Austrian border. Ms. Globe taunts me: "I can't believe you let a girl pass you on the autobahn!" Oh, my stomach.

Forgoing the ritual of pork, I order the fish. The damn thing comes to the table head and all, staring up at me with this look of "C'mon autobahn boy, let's see what you're made of."

As a capper, the autobahn was blocked on the way back, consigning us to a couple of hours of side-road gridlock. Then it poured. And pig for dinner.

Yeah, I know. Hardly a tragic tale. I'll try harder next year.

Freelance auto reviewer Peter Bleakney can be reached at pebleakney@sympatico.ca.

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