While Ferrari still signs up talent before graduation, it’s unlikely any teenagers worked on the F80. The path to developing begins with testing, usually for nine years. The difference? Development drivers work with prototypes while testers shake down completed customer cars. The latter is a ‘pure driving’ job, where you test everything from water ingress to ADAS tuning and ensure the car stops in a straight line and corners symmetrically.
To even stand a chance of moving into development, you must also be able to quickly discern between, say, two identical 12Cilindri models that have rolled off the line, based on production discrepancies and the tolerance variations in supplied parts. How long to develop that feel? Three years.
Not crashing is also a good idea. It can be very upsetting for the client. Although, based on 2024’s production of 13,700 cars and 40 minutes of shakedown for each, accidents are inevitable.
But if you’re talented and don’t crash much, the door to development is open. In the earliest assessments, de Simone overloads the budding developer with information at Fiorano to see how they cope. They must adapt fast, changing driving style and remembering commands. And they must enjoy it, as “we sell fun, not only cars”.
You then move into durability, where you’re introduced to prototypes approved by more senior staff. It’s tough work: instead of 40 minutes in a lavish, finished car, you spend seven hours in a far more complex environment, where you need “to speak with her, to learn her”, knowing the timbre of a squeak that leads to a failure.
And again, don’t crash. The Speciale prototypes cost around €2 million each, and for durability the stakes are higher still: “If you’re at 200,000km and you break the car, you’re interrupting a very long test, so it’s €2m plus the time and the kilometres spent, and you will never know when [for example] the gearbox would have broken. It’s a big responsibility.”
So it’s a long road to the top, but the brightest sparks might one day have the chance to attempt that special, abstract and very difficult thing. Which is what, Raffa? “To put art in the car.”