I'm not a car buff, but I am now indirectly related to one. My wife's niece married a young man last year, whose family lives in the Bay Area, like we and her parents do. I was paired with the young man's father for a couple of family dinners since we are about the same age and he has a hifi system. I asked him about it, and he couldn't remember the name of the speakers and said he didn't listen to it much (at a second dinner he remembered it was a pair of B&Ws). He did start talking about his car collection and his old camera collection. I don't know much about either one, but listened, asking a general question now and then. (He also collects watches - I didn't show him my Walmart $7.99 special). This past Thanksgiving we were paired together (this time after my wife and I had seen "Crazy Rich Asians".) I asked him about his car collection and he told me about his Ferrari purchases.
His latest one was a fancy Ferrari, some limited edition. But the special point he made was that he had ordered it with a custom removable top. Sounded like it was not a convertible like I am used to seeing, but a hard top that you could remove. Anyway, when the car arrived, it did not have the removable top. He said he was very upset and decided to write Ferrari about it. He told me he said he was a very good customer over the years. I asked how good a customer he was. He said he has bought 30 Ferraris over the past 30 years. Anyway, the punch line was that he received a message back from the factory that although they were closing production on the model that week, they would reopen to build him his custom Ferrari, which he received.
At Christmas, my son-in-law, who knows more about cars than I do, got to sit next to him, and he found out that the car he bought was called a La Ferrari. He also told my son in law that the dealer told he that there was another customer who doesn't buy just one fancy Ferrari a year, but 3 a year. Don't know whether the other fellow is Asian.
The fellow had a quite successful clothing manufacturing company in the US for many years. His son (an only child) is also interested in speedy vehicles. He drives one for a living. He is a captain in the Air Force and sits in the second seat of an F-15E Strike Eagle.
Larry
What a car! We still haven't asked him whether he has kept all the Ferraris that he has bought over the years or sells them (at a profit?) when he gets tired of them. He said something about them being "barely" street legal, whatever that means. I know at the wedding dinner in the fall of 2017, he said that at one point he had 150 cars in his collection. I asked him whether he drove them all, and how he kept them in driving condition. He said something about have some mechanics (don't know whether he was like Jay Leno and his cadre of staff). But he said he got tired of all the cars and sold them (most or all, it wasn't clear). I know when my wife's niece started dating his son, the son would be driving much nicer cars than our families were used to seeing. No Chevy Chevettes or VW Passats, but always fairly fancy German cars - but no Ferraris!Its the La Ferrari Aperta and without question you have to be a player to be considered for ownership. Essentially Ferrari contacts you about them, they are all sold long before production begins. Its an investment car and unfortunately are rarely ever driven as the value is in maintaining extremely low mileage, very sad as the car is a beast. One of our clients owns two and is not afraid to drive them.
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