Ultimate wealth & (horse) power

FERRARI’S ANNUAL CAVALCADE IS THE MONEY-CAN’T-BUY THRASH FEST RESERVED FOR MARANELLO’S ‘SUPER CLIENTS’. WE GATECRASH IN AN 812 GTS TO SEE HOW THE POINT-ONE PERCENT REALLY DO LIVE

- BEN OLIVER

IT MUST BE galling to lay down cash for your first new Ferrari, thinking that this must also buy you some status with its maker, only to discover that there are multiple levels of privilege and access which you didn’t know existed until you bought one, and you’re still at the bottom.

Let’s say you’d heard about Cavalcade, the annual four-day road rally Ferrari organises each year in a different Italian region. It costs A$40,000 to enter a car and a crew of two. Your business is doing okay and the cost might only be 10 percent of what you paid for your car, so you ask the salesman at your local dealership to book you a place. He shrugs his shoulders. He can’t help, because you’re just a standard client with a standard road car.

Cavalcade is for super-clients, the kind of guys (and it is mainly guys) who buy ‘specials’ like the LaFerrari, the Icona cars (just the two Monza models so far), and low-volume, hardcore versions of the standard range. Super-clients probably also do Corse Clienti activities like the Challenge race series or the F1 Clienti program in which you buy an old Ferrari F1 car and the Scuderia runs it for you. You might have an extreme, trackonly XX car, also shipped around the world for you by the factory, and your daily-driver Ferraris are almost certainly built to your unique specification by the Tailor Made program. Even owning a $80m 250 GTO doesn’t get you access to the super-client club, because you haven’t spent that money with Ferrari.