I can’t help noticing a... drift in the way LaFerrari owners have come to behave. If you’re the kind who has an Internet connection, you’ve probably seen that, over the last six months, more and more LaF drivers are hooning their hypercars. Drifting, doing donuts, drag racing, you name it - these people have developed a fetish for smoking those 345-section rear tires and it’s all ironic.
Don’t get me wrong, I love seeing Maranello’s halo pony being manhandled. It’s Ferrari itself that makes things ironic. Returning to what the Internet, as well as print media, have to offer, many of you know it’s pretty hard to find an instrumented tests that includes the LaFerrari, the P1, the 918 Spyder and a stopwatch.
Scrap that, it’s not hard, it’s impossible, and that’s because Ferrari doesn’t want this to happen. The Italians are so determined to prevent such tests that they go as far as forbidding LaFerrari owners to lend their cars to motoring media who want to set up this kind of races.
This is exactly what happened to Motor Trend - they had planned a match between the Big Exotic Three but were forced to downsize to a confrontation between the P1 and the 918 Spyder. As expected, both cars were happily supplied by their makers.
Last time we checked, when you paid $1.3M for a car, you're pretty much free to submit it to any test. It looks like the Prancing Horse is mistaking its road-going LaFerrari with the hypercar's racing version, the FXXK. The latter costs double and you never get to own it. You pay the price to Ferrari and they fly you to events where you get to drive your car while the FXXK resides with the mothership in the rest of the time.
Then again, when you've satisfied the minimal requirement of owning 5 Ferraris in order to be eligible to purchase a LaFerrari, you're probably going to respect the instructions you receive when Maranello calls you.
OK, so these people won't track their LaFerraris while clocking it. So everybody will stay nicely in line, right? Well, not exactly. Instead, drivers of the 950 HP (963 PS) Ferrari are drifting on Monza, drifting on the Nurburgring, doing donuts in an airport hangar, drag racing Veyrons or powersliding on public roads.
If you think about it, all these moves end up doing exactly what Ferrari wanted to avoid, namely risking affecting the Cavallino Rampante's image.
I'm not saying that keeping LaFerrari owners under control is causing them to hoon their cars. After all, the Ferrari Enzo-abusing drivers had no such constraints.
However, I can't help notice that such things haven't happened with the other two hybrid hypercars. Sure, 918 Spyders and P1s may have been hooned, but certainly this didn't happen to the same extent as in the LaFerrari's case.
I keep asking myself what would happen if a guy who owned all three hybrid hypercars wanted to tackle the Nurburgring or Laguna Seca and throw some maths into the equation. Would his LaFerrari thus become a lesser car than his other two petrol-electric rides simply because he couldn't use it in such conditions? Oh and by the way, I'd like to remind you there is more that just one man who decided to buy the full trio.
Scrap that, it’s not hard, it’s impossible, and that’s because Ferrari doesn’t want this to happen. The Italians are so determined to prevent such tests that they go as far as forbidding LaFerrari owners to lend their cars to motoring media who want to set up this kind of races.
This is exactly what happened to Motor Trend - they had planned a match between the Big Exotic Three but were forced to downsize to a confrontation between the P1 and the 918 Spyder. As expected, both cars were happily supplied by their makers.
Last time we checked, when you paid $1.3M for a car, you're pretty much free to submit it to any test. It looks like the Prancing Horse is mistaking its road-going LaFerrari with the hypercar's racing version, the FXXK. The latter costs double and you never get to own it. You pay the price to Ferrari and they fly you to events where you get to drive your car while the FXXK resides with the mothership in the rest of the time.
Then again, when you've satisfied the minimal requirement of owning 5 Ferraris in order to be eligible to purchase a LaFerrari, you're probably going to respect the instructions you receive when Maranello calls you.
OK, so these people won't track their LaFerraris while clocking it. So everybody will stay nicely in line, right? Well, not exactly. Instead, drivers of the 950 HP (963 PS) Ferrari are drifting on Monza, drifting on the Nurburgring, doing donuts in an airport hangar, drag racing Veyrons or powersliding on public roads.
If you think about it, all these moves end up doing exactly what Ferrari wanted to avoid, namely risking affecting the Cavallino Rampante's image.
I'm not saying that keeping LaFerrari owners under control is causing them to hoon their cars. After all, the Ferrari Enzo-abusing drivers had no such constraints.
However, I can't help notice that such things haven't happened with the other two hybrid hypercars. Sure, 918 Spyders and P1s may have been hooned, but certainly this didn't happen to the same extent as in the LaFerrari's case.
I keep asking myself what would happen if a guy who owned all three hybrid hypercars wanted to tackle the Nurburgring or Laguna Seca and throw some maths into the equation. Would his LaFerrari thus become a lesser car than his other two petrol-electric rides simply because he couldn't use it in such conditions? Oh and by the way, I'd like to remind you there is more that just one man who decided to buy the full trio.
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