Bloomberg reports that Ferrari workers walked off the job for four hours yesterday, in protest of planned job cuts and production idling. Ferrari has announced that it plans to eliminate 120 office jobs and 150 production jobs, or nearly ten percent of its workforce. The Italian sportscar firm has also said it will put 600 workers on a week-long furlough next week, as it idles production of engines for its sister brand Maserati at a Maranello plant. Last year, Ferrari built about 4,500 engines for Maserati, about half of the 2008 number, as sales of the brand fell.
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Despite breaking new ground in the field of brand leverage with its Ferrari World Abu Dhabi theme park, Ferrari does seem to have lost the plot a bit in relation to its “other” business building expensive sportscars. Ferrari’s abandonment of the manual transmission might be justified by faster lap times at Fiorano, and the lightning-fast, dual-wet-clutch transmissions that replace them certainly seem to help keep the Scuderia at the bleeding edge of technology (even if they’re designed and built by Getrag). But underlying the faster times, higher speeds and “digital supercar” honorifics from the motoring press, there’s a sense that Ferrari’s progress must accommodate an ever-more ambitious business plan as much as design the world’s most capable and emotive sportscars. And it’s starting to bear some troubling fruit.
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Worried that a ride-over-handling-oriented California, the end of manual transmissions and flirtations with hybrid power have left Ferrari without any kind of brand focus? Don’t be, Maranello spokesfolks tell Autocar. There is at least one line that Ferrari will never cross: building a four-door to compete with Aston-Martin’s Rapide, Porsche’s Panamera or Audi’s A7.
As Enzo [Ferrari, company founder] would say, we will never do four doors. And we will keep this tradition. Frankly speaking no-one is asking for a four-door Ferrari. If you want a four door Ferrari we have a Maserati. We stand 60 years and we never needed four doors. What never means, I don’t know, but one of the strong points of Ferrari is to keep the product in the right way. I’m not saying four doors is not right for the image, but it’s not part of our heritage.
Unless you’re the Sultan of Brunei, anyway.
Yes, Ferrari recorded the fastest “production-based, non-street-legal” lap of the Nürburgring today, breaking the hallowed 7-minute mark with a 6:48:16 time in its 599XX. The only question I have is why did they bother? Is it possible that Ferrari is having trouble selling enough copies of the $2m+, track-only version of the 599 GTB? Not likely, considering the Scuderia won’t sell you one (regardless of how much you’re willing to pay for it), unless you’re on an exclusive invite list for the Enzo-powered track toy. So why trumpet a non-production record at all? Isn’t the very significance of a Ring rooted in the idea that it’s the ultimate test of a road car, packing nearly every imaginable on-road condition into each wrenching lap? Shouldn’t Ferrari have at least tried for lap time in its new fastest road-legal car, the 599 GTO? Especially considering it’s debuting today, at the Beijing Auto Show? Oh well, at least the 599XX makes some serious earcandy noises… if only for six minutes, 48 seconds and change.
Given Ferrari’s pricing politics, it seems safe to assume that Ferrari/Maserati is a fairly profitable enterprise for its 85 percent owner, Fiat. Indeed, with over $2.5b in combined revenues last year and an 11.5 percent operating margin, the Italian sportscar brands aren’t exactly dying of economic downturn-related causes. But at today’s presentation of Fiat’s five year plan, CEO Sergio Marchionne revealed that his firm has big plans for Ferrari/Maserati, and gave unprecedented planning details as proof of the brands’ path towards even greater profitability.
The man’s wife, an actress who looked Scandinavian, called it “The Monster.”
“You’ve come for the Monster,” she said.
“Yes, I have,” I said. Meanwhile trying to figure out why she would call one of Pininfarina’s most beautiful Ferraris– the GTC/4– “The Monster.”
I say “most beautiful” but the Italians, with their ever more refined eyes for body shapes (both women and cars) called it “the hunchback with clown lips” because it had an ever so slight rise to the center of the rear deck lid, and up front there was a rubber bumper surround. Neither feature hurt the car’s looks but you know the Italians. They wanted things just right or they would find something to criticize.
I found out later on, once I took the car, it ate money. It wasn’t the cookie monster, but the money monster.
Or is it the other way around? Based on the latest readings from our official TTAC losing-the-plot-ometer, Porsche is still at least ten years away from matching this spectacular achievement in short-sighted brand narcissism.
As Ferrari leaves its traditional elegance aside in favor of expeditions to the limits of geek-gauche, few efforts by the Modena firm are as dismaying as its Special Projects one-offs. Jimmy Glickenhaus’s million-dollar Enzo-upgrade, the Pininfarina P4/5 set the pattern: one-off Ferraris must clearly signal that their owners have far more money than taste. Following in that bold tradition is this, the P540 Superfast Aperta, based on the 599 GTB. Though it looks like the buyer, Edward Walson, simply asked for a gold, targa-topped 599 with 250 GTO styling cues, the Aperta was actually inspired by the gold Fezza from Fellini’s Toby Dammit. Not that the pedigree keeps the Aperta from looking like a 1970s oil-sheik special. And considering this dismal re-working does such disservice to Ferrari’s best-looking car (plus the targa-top adds 50 lbs), it’s hard to see why they were so certain the project was “in keeping with the brand’s ideals,” as Autocar puts it. On the plus side, Walson gets the 540’s tooling to ensure uniqueness. Here’s hoping it stays as “unique” as it is “special.”.
Following the Scottsdale auction season, dealers at the top end of the collector car market breathed a collective sigh of relief. As the the New York Times headline put it, the auction action proved that prices “Soften but Don’t Crash.” Maybe so, but there’s a hidden dynamic involved. “People tend to forget that the auction houses work just as hard at reducing the sellers’ price as they do on getting the buyers to pay it,” says Mike Nicholl, proprietor of Las Vegas’ Classic and Collectible Cars. In other words, the results simply reaffirm that car sellers’ willingness to take a hit currently matches buyers’ bargain-hunting budgets. The General Manager of Lamborghini Bergen County (NJ) agrees. He says pre-owned inventory levels are up, but the deals are still going down. “More people are hurting, looking to get out of their cars,” Alan Greenfield says. “But the lower prices are attracting new buyers.” Despite the market’s recent diet of anti-gravity pills, or at least away from the people dispensing same, there are signs that the high end market is headed for collapse.
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