4th Birthday Surprise

Wow, I've just realised I've not posted for 2 weeks - it's been so busy with setting up the Marketing and Events for 2010. We are planning an unprecedented 17 events this year - many of which are already over half sold. If you are planning on joining the Nurburgring trip you'll have to hurry, we have only 6 places left!





Anyway, last night we held our first London Members Only Event - we celebrated our 4th Birthday with the arrival of our Ferrari 599.



Rather than our usual huge party crammed with freeloaders we decided to invite only members and their guests, and I'm really pleased that we got about 40 members to show up - that's 30% of our membership which is quite amazing for a weekday night. A big thanks to all those members who showed up and gave us the confidence to do more Members Only events.

As for the 599 - I was starting to worry that this was turning into my nemesis! It's the third time in 6 months that I have tried to get one - each time, I have just not been able to line up the financier and an appropriate car at the same time and even this time the sale nearly fell through a couple of times in the last couple of weeks. I am so relieved to have one because to be honest I felt a bit naked without one - it was the one car that I have always felt is missing from our fleet and we really OUGHT to have and yet because they depreciate so badly from new, it never made sense to buy a new or ex-demo one and since there aren't many around to choose from, finding a second-hand model with the right mileage, age, and onwership history was really tough.

Anyway, we're there now and our other additions for the year are looking solid. The R8 Spyder is on track for April and I have a confirmation letter from Ferrari stating a July delivery for the 458 (note: slipped by a month already) - for the sceptics amongst you just pop into the office if you want to see it.

458Italia Preview

Reservation-holders for the 458Italia were invited to an exclusive UK preview of the car at the Hurlingham Club last night and I went along with Martin King, one of our long standing members in London (see him grinning in the photo below).

The car is absolutely fantastic...with lots of new design features that you don't really appreciate from pictures, but I'll try all the same...

My favourites are the triple pipe exhaust, the Prancing Horse at the front (which is actually in suspended animation), and all the driver controls have been moved on to the steering wheel so there are no indicator and headlight sticks. It looks lovely, although I'm not sure how easy it will be to figure out which way to indicate when your hands are half-twisted when you are on a roundabout - Of course Italian drivers don't use indicators anyway so I can see why they didn't bother worrying about it!

Personally I really like it in this 'new yellow' colour but Martin wasn't convinced and when we found out it was a £12,000 option, the debate ended quite sharpish. Best of all, I did't meet anyone with an earlier due date than e25.

Note to self: I really must get better at taking pictures.