Ferrari responds to press-car fracas

Geneva International Motor Show

The boss of Italian sports-car maker Ferrari has spoken openly for the first time about accusations the company modified vehicles for media evaluation.

A US website published a story last week that claimed some Ferrari cars came in for special attention before being used for track testing by the media.

But at the Geneva motor show overnight, Ferrari CEO Amedeo Felisa refuted the claims and said there is no difference in performance between cars sold to customers and cars supplied to media.

"This is a ridiculous suggestion," he told the Carsales Network. "We are not preparing [media] cars in order to have better performance. This is not the policy of the company. The cars [that media test] are the same as the customer gets. We keep our position, we don't cheat."

He said Ferrari began providing cars for magazines tests – sometimes transporting vehicles from Italy to the UK and other parts of Europe – so magazines could avoid using poorly maintained customer-owned Ferraris.

"Fifteen years ago we had some bad experiences," he said. "We had some bad articles because some magazines used customer cars that were not maintained properly and they were not in standard condition. There were problems with non-standard tyres, non-standard exhausts and so on.

"We don't want articles coming from customer cars because we don't know what condition it is in – not because we are preparing the cars for the press. It is not fair to judge a car when it is not how the manufacturer intended it.

"Sometimes journalists don't like to wait and so they use customer cars. They want to make articles [but] we don't always have cars available."
Felisa said he would stand by any performance claim made by his company for Ferrari cars.

"We know we don't have anything to prove because we know what our cars are capable of, and our customers know what our cars are capable of," he said. "But these are Ferraris, and we have a long [customer] waiting list. We don't have spare cars just waiting for the media to telephone us."

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