Race Your Own F1 Car

Ferrari has created a unique and astronomically expensive experience for the world’s greatest car lovers – The Corse Clienti.

- Stephen Corby

You could compare it with paying US$1 million to hit a ball with Sachin Tendulkar’s cricket bat, or Björn Borg’s tennis racquet, but it wouldn’t be quite right, because those sporting artefacts are far less likely to kill you.

Realistically, it’s more like paying big bucks to borrow the plane that Chuck Yeager used to become the first man to break the sound barrier, or an Apollo rocket.

What we’re talking about is the unique and astronomically expensive experience that Ferrari offers to a selected group of crazed car enthusiasts, which it calls the Corse Clienti.

There really is nothing else like this in the world, because Formula 1®’s most important and glamorous team allows people not only to buy its hugely fast former race cars, but also to race them.

Slapping down a seven-figure sum doesn’t mean you get to take home, for example, the particular car with which the legendary Michael Schumacher won several races. Ferrari prefers to keep these historic vehicles in a big, beautiful shed at its Museo Ferrari in Maranello, Italy, even when other people own them. But you can drive your investment whenever, and almost wherever, you like.

And as part of your top-secret but surely extortionate annual fees, Ferrari will fly over not only the car but a whole crew of engineers and their laptops to help you actually get it on the road.

“It is an amazing, incredible reality, you know, because we are alone in doing this. No-one else can do anything like it,” enthuses Antonello Coletta, a boyish 51, and head of Ferrari’s Corse Clienti activities.

“We are lucky because we have a large number of customers who are very sports focused, so it’s quite easy to find people to take part in this; we have more people wanting to buy F1 cars than we have cars.