If you are a crazy rich man, you can pay Ferrari to do the test.

MONTEREY, Calif .- "Let me tell you about the very rich, they are different from you and me." These words were written by F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1926 and remain true nearly a century later. This is certainly true when it comes to cars, where the balance of a bank of phone numbers opens doors to machines to which we are never close that in video games. Recently, I had the opportunity to take a look behind this curtain at the historic Laguna Seca circuit in California.

Once upon a time, the supercar was the top of the tree, and cars like the McLaren F1 and Ferrari Enzo have rewritten the rules on the speed and cost of a car. Shortly after, this kind of performance has echoed: even a Tesla P100D will beat one of those cars in a race at 100 mph, for example, and so we had the passenger car.

Carbon fiber hybrids consuming about 1,000 horsepower on the fly and displaying seven-digit price tags have become the new predators of the automotive world, but for some, they have even become too common and too pedestrian . So what do you do if you have several million dollars burning a hole in your pocket and want to go fast, really, really quick? For a certain type of person, the answer is that you call Ferrari and ask questions about his Corsa Clienti program.

FXX-King fast

The Ferrari XX program started in 2005 when the company decided to offer a small number of its best customers (and perhaps even the most demanding) something a little more hardcore than its supercar Enzo. Thus was born the FXX, which abandoned all claim of legality of the street to integrate in its place a certain techno-magic of its program of formula 1 completely conquering. An XX variant of the front-engine 599 appeared in 2009, followed by an Evoluzione 599XX, and more recently the FXX-K hybrids derived from LaFerrari and now FXX-K Evo. Obviously, if you have to ask for the price, you can not afford it, but do not expect much change from $ 3 million.

This is, at any conceivable cost, an extravagant amount of money to spend on a car, especially a car that you can not drive to the shops. The Corsa Clienti program is extremely strict about protecting the privacy of these customers, but I was able to discuss with Ferrari's Filippo Petrucci, who runs the program, to find out more.

"[The XX Clienti] program is very exclusive, to have a direct customer agreement to the factory. We are a manufacturer, we are not the reseller. So I can directly give the comments of my customers about the car at the design office, "he told Ars. I'll give you an example: when we released the FXX-K, there was a Version Evo project, which we have now. And before starting the project with the people who visited the Maranello design office, my goal was to ask our customers and ask them what you would do with this car. "OK, you put that car, what do you like to do better, what do you want to have?" And obviously, when the car has been completed, most of the Evo's have the new implementation comes from suggestion. "

I had already read how Ferrari used the XX Clienti program to improve its future cars. I had imagined that customer feedback went in the direction of the chassis balances or intervention limits of Ferrari's electronic driver anti-skid control (SSC) driver assistance. It turns out that I thought about it too much.

"For example, the steering wheel: Someone complained that the steering wheel was not enough of a racing wheel, [but instead more] like the street version of the Ferrari steering wheel. As a result of our customer's suggestions, we decided to install a proper racing wheel, as in the GTE, GT3 cars. Petrucci explained, "Now there is a real racing wheel, or someone complained about the layout of the cars -" We prefer to have this switch in another position. We really had their suggestion, and we try to follow as much as possible their suggestions, which is pretty unique [for a car manufacturer]. "

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