Tuesday
Slight day of hiatus today - not following the trucks or anything, instead we are treated to a visit to the Ferrari factory. It's fascinating to see the production process and you'll be deeply unsurprised to learn that the new parts of its factory look nothing like a production plant is supposed to: it's all glass, stainless steel and brushed aluminium rather than grease and piles of swarf and discarded widgets everywhere.
In fact as it's been put together by respected architects with an eye to maximising the natural light and with substantial amounts of greenery inside, it feels more like an expensive batchelor appartment. Only with great big robots machining-out engine blocks and dipping various expensive car parts in liquid nitrogen. That sort of thing.
The assembly line too is a thing of wonder. Although on the line for the California (small-ish, expensive) only 30 cars are built per day it's still a busy factory and all very state of the art. The body rolls in from the paint shop suspended in a cradle. It ends up on a bench to have all the cabling fitted and is eventually 'married' to the cradle-suspended chassis. It's a sight to behold. Somehow you suspect that Iveco's various plants are not quite the same.
Ferrari also operates a great business model where it sells all its old F1 cars to collectors two years after the end of a season. The majority are stored at Maranello. A room chock-full of bright red Grand Prix cars is quite a sight. They are run by their owners from time to time - crashes are costly: a simple repair for broken suspension arms is a tidy £300,000.
Now to Torino and meetings with various Iveco luminaries - it promises to be interesting if less glamorous.