Is this the way to Maranello?
ONE OF MY lockdown hobbies is scanning online classic car auction sites and dreaming of owning some of the exotics that appear. Especially those machines that seem to be a bargain. Last week a company called H&H Auctions held an online auction and one of the lots was a Ferrari 456GT.
Guide price was £22-£24,000 and the car eventually sold for £34,000.That’s an awful lot of car for the money even if it would be nerve-rackingly expensive to run.
The Ferrari was painted in dark blue and had a manual gearbox.
Exactly the same specification as the 456GT that I once collected from the Ferrari factory in Maranello and drove back to the UK. If you asked me to recall the best road trip of my working life as a motoring journalist I think this would be it.
I was 31 years-old and was working at the respected monthly magazine Car.A fax (remember them?) came through on Car magazine’s machine. It was addressed to the editor and it came from an address in Italy. Maranello to be exact.
It confirmed that Ferrari was expecting Colin Goodwin to arrive next week to collect a new 456GT. I hadn’t been told because the editor had forgotten to mention to me that he’d organised for me to collect the car and bring it back to the UK for a comparison test with an Aston Martin Vantage.
I’d only driven one Ferrari before and that was a short trip to the Millbrook testing facility at Bedford in a 348 GTB. But a proper road trip in one, that was amazing.
The routine had been set by countless other journalists who’d gone before: fly to Bologna, rent a small Fiat, thrash it along the autostrada to Maranello, stay in either the Fini hotel or the Europa depending on your budget.
Then present yourself at Ferrari the next morning where somebody would tell you that the car wasn’t quite ready. So