This week I have a Ferrari GTC4 Lusso. It means Luxury Ferrari and it is a four wheel drive grand tourer with four seats: the Ferrari family car, a ludicrous phrase until you own one. I collect it in Slough and drive it along the A303 past Stonehenge. It is only slightly less monumental than Stonehenge. It looks like a very beautiful foot.
Ferrari is the most famous brand in the world and the oldest and most successful formula racing team. Last year a 1963 250 GTO Ferrari sold for $70 million; sometimes a model sells out even before it is built. Ferrari fans buy Ferrari caps, carry Ferrari bags, wear Ferrari jackets. They try, quite hard, to be Ferraris. Enzo Ferrari only sold cars to finance his love of motor racing; and he only sold them to people he liked.
I have driven one already in Italy, near Mont Blanc with an instructor who won the Monte Carlo Rally in 1997. His name is Piero Liatti. He kept an easy arm on the wheel with the smile of a man who had found where he belonged: on top of a V12 engine in a cabin that smelt of fine leather in the shape of a beautiful foot. Car manufacturers invite journalists abroad to inhabit the lives of their clients, and stay in incredible hotels. The last one – for a different brand – had me stay in a remote cliff top hotel that looked like a Holocaust museum and spa. It is welcome, but unnecessary. Nothing I saw in Italy – the castle, the mountain – was more beautiful than the Ferrari. Perhaps that was why I was there. To understand that point. Perhaps that is why I collect it in Slough. The same point.
On British roads Aston Martins inspire love; Rolls Royces envy. The Ferrari inspires something more religious: it is awe. I wish I had Piero with me near the Exeter services because I have not driven on a British motorway before. Lorry drivers surround me and stare: why am I driving a Ferrari with a top speed of 208 mph in the slow lane of the M5? Do I have supercar dysmorphic disorder, in which you drive a Ferrari GTC4 Lusso which you believe is a VW Up? I wonder whether I seek supercars to spite men; to walk in their dreams. They may not want me, but they want my car; and what better reason to buy one? I wish they had seen me indicate into the pit lane at the Goodwood media day. Mirror, signal, manoeuvre and a stately turn right. Apparently no one has done that before. It is a first for the Vogue motoring column. I wish I were ready to make “the noise”. You do it by driving manually in a tunnel, but I can’t do it because I am confused that the indicators are buttons. It says: I am ahead of you, and away. I am riding a dragon with cup-holders.
The combustion engine is a series of continued explosions. It is both metaphor and machine. I feel this Ferrari has a consciousness peculiar to itself. It wants to go longer and faster and harder. It wants to be in a porn film. I drive it 270 miles, Slough to west Cornwall. I feel it sulks when I park it by the fishworks that is decorated, mysteriously, with Nazi insignia. In a village it is best not to ask why the fishworks is wearing Nazi insignia. I have a strange sense that it has merely warmed up, and now wants to go to Scotland, and I have thwarted it. Perhaps one day it will have the ability to go by itself.
I am breathless, lustful, deranged; and it is not just me. I am told they are talking about the Ferrari in the pubs of St Just in Penwith ten miles away. I want more of it. That is why I am writing staccato, for the Ferrari places me somewhere beyond words. The supercar is the ultimate consumer good, and the only one I really desire. This frightens and thrills me but at least the phrase consumer capitalism is apt. It is, quite literally, consuming.
