• last year
Collector car dealer Jake Auerbach breaks down how Ferrari is portrayed in movies, including 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off,' 'Miami Vice,' 'Magnum P.I.,' 'Goldeneye,' 'Ferrari,' 'Ford v Ferrari,' 'Le Mans,' 'National Lampoon's Vacation,' 'Vanilla Sky,' 'Tower Heist,' 'Scent of a Woman,' 'The Fast and the Furious,' 'The Rock,' 'Bad Boys II' and 'Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle.'
Transcript
00:00 Nice car. What's the retail on one of those? More than you can afford, pal. Ferrari.
00:06 Smoke.
00:09 I think there are probably quite a few Ferrari owners who felt called out by this.
00:14 Being able to afford one doesn't necessarily make you capable of driving one.
00:18 So with the release of Michael Mann's new Ferrari film, which takes a look at the origin story of Ferrari,
00:24 seems like a good time to look at some of the more famous on-screen appearances of these cars.
00:29 My name's Jake Auerbach. I'm a collector car dealer and founding partner of Morton Street Partners.
00:34 This is the breakdown.
00:35 Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
00:43 1961 Ferrari 250 GT California.
00:49 Fortunately, given what's about to happen,
00:58 this is a replica used in Ferris Bueller.
01:01 They made three for the movie. One for show and a couple for go.
01:05 They actually did a great job getting a lot of these details right.
01:10 This was the show replica, I believe, which was based on a Datsun of all things.
01:15 There was another replica used in some shots, which I owned briefly,
01:20 which was based on a Plymouth with a slant six, basically a pickup truck.
01:24 They get a lot of details right. There were fewer than 100. There were only about 50.
01:27 The Cal Spider is, to a lot of people, the Ferrari.
01:33 This is a covered headlight version, which is a little bit more desirable.
01:36 My father loves his car more than life itself.
01:39 A man with priorities so fired up whack doesn't deserve such a fine automobile.
01:43 I think this scene is so perfect in distilling down the life cycle of the collector.
01:49 And you sort of grow up. If you could sort of imagine, you know,
01:52 one day to skip school and do anything you want,
01:55 the thing you would do is drive a Ferrari fast through the streets and take it off jumps.
02:00 And then by the time you're old enough to maybe afford one,
02:03 all you want to do is sort of fix it and look at it and never drive it.
02:06 And it's such a perfect sort of confrontation of those two things.
02:10 You know, these are really valuable objects.
02:12 Even at the time this movie was made, they were really valuable.
02:14 Today, it's quite a bit more valuable. We're talking nine to 18 million.
02:20 A wide range just because there's a lot of different configurations and colors and everything else.
02:24 I think actually the sort of the main replica sold fairly recently for a few hundred thousand dollars,
02:30 which is a good result for a Datsun.
02:33 A lot of companies do a great job of getting the visuals somewhat right.
02:37 To somebody like me, a lot of things jump out quickly, even in this little tight frame.
02:42 The fender flares, the way that the sort of headlights fit, the buckets, the hood scoop is a little wonky.
02:48 It's a little stubbier than it should be. The wheels are wrong.
02:51 The windshield's too thick. Does it matter?
02:54 You know, we're trying to get something across here.
02:56 And I think they do it well. They got the broad strokes of it.
03:00 I think to anyone looking at this scene, that looks like an expensive Ferrari and sort of mission accomplished.
03:06 Miami Vice.
03:16 So the Miami Vice Daytona Spyder is one that is a little bit more obviously a replica.
03:22 And I think it spent a lot of time on screen.
03:24 There's a few details here that are just totally off.
03:27 It's a Corvette underneath, a C3 Corvette.
03:31 And I think that bummed Ferrari out pretty hard.
03:35 It marks the beginning of them being really protective of the way their cars were used.
03:39 It's something they continue today, where if you own a Ferrari and want to sort of mess with it,
03:44 sort of do your own thing to it, customize it visually or in the engine,
03:48 it's not unusual you get a cease and desist.
03:50 They treat the silhouettes and the design of their cars as their sort of real patrimony,
03:55 and they don't want people abusing it.
03:57 So Ferrari saw the Daytona Spyder replica, and it doesn't do justice to what a Ferrari is.
04:03 I think Ferrari stepped in and said, "Let's get you the real issue."
04:07 They had this Tessarossa. I mean, it was basically an on-screen character.
04:11 It was a bit of a ton for the brand. Today we all still think of it as sort of the main character in Miami Vice is the car.
04:17 [Car engine revving]
04:24 How does that sound?
04:25 It doesn't sound quite right, if we're being honest here.
04:28 Probably not the best thing in the world to cold rev a flat 12, a box of 12 Ferrari engine out of the box,
04:36 but that's a real car.
04:37 And this is an early Tessarossa, what we call the monospecio, or the single mirror, or the flying mirror.
04:44 You can see it has just one side view mirror mounted quite high up on the driver's side.
04:49 It also has the earlier wheels. It's also white, cocaine white, if we're talking Miami Vice.
04:56 I think a lot of people look at the Tessarossa as a car that's about appearances, about flash.
05:01 This marked the beginning of a really weird period of speculation on Ferrari prices, and the prices of new Tessarossas,
05:07 even in the period, skyrocketed to even some people paying close to a million dollars for these towards the end of the 80s,
05:14 and this weird sort of bubble that happened.
05:16 They've come down now. You can get a Tessarossa for $150,000.
05:20 These are tremendous cars to drive. Really fast. They handle well.
05:26 They're a mid-engine, 12-cylinder race car with turn signals, as most Ferraris not just show.
05:32 Quite a bit of go.
05:34 This is the way a Ferrari should be driven.
05:45 Like you're fleeing from attack dogs. I think if you're driving it any less, it's being wasted.
05:51 This car is, I think, to me, one of the more iconic on-screen appearances.
05:57 It's also the bane of every red Ferrari owner's existence.
06:01 If you own any red Ferrari from the 80s, people will go up to you and say, "Magnum PI, right?"
06:07 This is sort of the low car on the totem pole.
06:10 It was the first Ferrari-badged mid-engine V8 car.
06:14 It was an entry-level car. This is full Fiat in effect here.
06:18 Lots of plastic on it. Lots of sort of parts bin stuff.
06:21 Great cars to drive, truly, but they were meant to be an affordable and approachable entry point.
06:27 A lot of people think it's flattering, maybe, say, "Magnum PI, right?"
06:32 It's sort of, today, a little bit of a knock.
06:35 Ferraris, red is the color. Rosso Corsa, racing red.
06:39 It's really tied into the identity of the brand.
06:42 It goes back to a point where racing was really a national sort of pride point.
06:48 Cars were actually painted according to the nationality of the manufacturer.
06:52 Italy was red. Germany was white and then silver.
06:57 England was green, so British Racing Green.
07:00 If you ask Ferrari why cars are red, there's a famous quote that, you know,
07:05 if you hand a child a box of crayons and tell him to draw a racing car, he'll use the red crayon.
07:11 GoldenEye.
07:12 "Who's that?" "The next car."
07:19 It's such a great scene.
07:23 Hey, I've never tried it, but I think you could do eight sort of pirouettes in a 355.
07:29 This marks sort of the end of when you could do stuff like that with a Ferrari,
07:34 in the sense that you go much later into the 360s and 430s,
07:38 you have a lot of electronic driving aids, electronic steering or brake control, whatever else.
07:43 These cars had power steering, but by and large,
07:45 you could sort of switch things off and sort of have an analog experience.
07:49 This is the TS version, which is sort of a semi-convertible.
07:54 You can see the top comes off, but you still have those pillars behind you,
07:58 the sort of flying buttress design.
08:00 People tend to fall into one camp or another.
08:02 They're like the full spiders with the full top that sort of folds in, or these TS's.
08:07 This was the first, or second generation of Ferraris where you could get paddle shifters,
08:11 but most of them were still manual transmission cars with an old school shifter right there,
08:16 three pedals, which is the way a lot of people feel a Ferrari should be.
08:20 Ferrari.
08:22 "Two objects cannot occupy the same point in space,
08:26 the same moment in time."
08:29 The Ferrari movie, it takes on, you know, the early days of Ferrari.
08:35 There was a racing company which sold cars to subsidize those racing efforts.
08:39 This was a point in time where road racing was a deadly venture.
08:44 In the 50s, a lot of road racing was still long distances on public roads.
08:50 You have Miele, Carrera Panamericana, Targa Florio.
08:53 These were races where they shut the streets down,
08:55 they gave the drivers a map and said, "Finish there."
09:00 Miele was sort of the big race, the Miele Melia, thousand miles.
09:04 This was an Italian race, there was pride at stake.
09:07 The movie culminates with the '57 Miele, which was the final iteration of that event.
09:14 The 315S was the car that was the most advanced Ferrari at the time and the one they ran.
09:18 The 315 was a continuation of their MM program, and the MM stood for Miele Melia.
09:25 These cars were brutally fast and, you know, could approach 200 miles per hour.
09:32 One of the reasons these cars are so beautiful is they hadn't figured out how useful wings were when it came to racing.
09:38 This is an era we sometimes call "sculpted by the wind."
09:41 It was sort of fluid dynamics that had originally inspired a lot of this sort of,
09:45 "Let's think about the wind, realize that it's actually an immovable force we need to slice through."
09:50 Typically, cars of this period, once they got to these speeds up, you know, close to 200 miles per hour,
09:56 they began to lift and get very dicey.
09:59 That was the limiting factor.
10:01 But Enzo Ferrari famously felt that aerodynamics were for people who couldn't build engines.
10:07 He was about power.
10:09 You know, they began to relent and sort of incorporate aerodynamics and covered headlights
10:13 in terms of making things more aerodynamic, but still, it held true for them.
10:18 They thought, "We needed to build the biggest, most powerful engine."
10:21 This was also a period of time where there weren't strict regulations on the size of the engine.
10:26 Ford versus Ferrari.
10:30 [engines revving]
10:34 So in this clip, you have Christian Bale in the GT40 and a 330 P3 being driven next to him at Le Mans
10:46 on one of the many long straights that they had there, probably in excess of 200 miles per hour.
10:51 The 24 hours at Le Mans is today still really the sort of defining endurance race.
10:56 24 hours. It used to start with the drivers standing across from their cars.
11:01 A gun would go off and you'd actually have to run across the track, get in your car and start it,
11:06 and then drive off.
11:08 But the goal was who can drive the farthest over 24 hours.
11:12 A lot of teams have said, "Well, let's just go the fastest."
11:14 Others said, "Let's have the biggest fuel tank, you know, so we don't have to be in the pits for as long."
11:19 The Ford-Ferrari film got a lot right about Le Mans,
11:23 which is to say it's an unusual track in that it's not very difficult to drive it.
11:27 It's really composed of a lot of long straight roads.
11:30 You go really fast and you have to take a turn and then you go really fast for a long straight and turn again.
11:37 And you end up in these sort of neck and neck battles at extraordinarily high speeds,
11:42 where it's about who blinks first and who brakes last.
11:46 Over 24 hours, how many moments are there like this where the guys are white knuckling it,
11:50 pushing the pedal all the way down?
11:52 Probably not as many as the film made it seem.
11:55 There's a lot of Le Mans racing that's just sort of maintaining your speed, not using too much fuel.
12:02 Oh my God. Oh my God!
12:05 You're neck and neck, turning your head, checking, you know, Christian Bale,
12:08 sort of turning to the left at 205 miles per hour.
12:11 Drivers tend to have great peripheral vision and just a general sense of where everyone is without needing to turn.
12:18 Le Mans.
12:21 [engine revving]
12:34 If you want to talk about Le Mans, talk about cars on film, Le Mans is sort of the movie.
12:39 A little short on dialogue, but a lot of great driving shots.
12:45 And this is a movie where a lot of the real cars were used.
12:49 They even retrofitted a number of the real cars with cameras.
12:54 And they actually drove during the race. I mean, this was not a stage thing.
12:58 This was integrated into the Le Mans race in 1970 or '71.
13:03 [engine revving]
13:08 This was a really interesting car in that you begin to see the first stages of heavy aerodynamics,
13:13 modeling that into the automobile.
13:16 They made 25 of these. It was the beginning of homologation rules.
13:20 Homologation is a sort of sanctioning body requires, if you want to race,
13:24 you have to have a real car that you built 25 of, let's say.
13:27 So they couldn't just build one insane prototype.
13:30 They had to actually scale this thing in an effort to sort of keep down some of the wacky,
13:35 sort of over the top engineering that went into some of these cars.
13:39 This was a successful, but now wildly successful car for Ferrari.
13:43 And it was their first entry back into endurance racing after having lost to Ford
13:48 and kind of walking away with their tail between their legs.
13:52 One of the coolest parts of endurance racing, at least as it used to be run,
13:56 is to see the length these teams would go to to keep their cars running.
14:01 And this is entirely accurate to the way these sort of pit crews approached this.
14:05 You see them putting on a new nose for one of the cars here.
14:08 These are Zeus fasteners, which are sort of quick release,
14:11 so you can take the entire bonnet off in a second and put a new one on.
14:14 And quick release fuel fillers you just saw there,
14:17 which were featured on some of the Ferrari competition road models,
14:20 where you can sort of bang on it with one hand, the cap flies off and then slam it shut again.
14:24 I don't know what it was about the Griswold's green station wagon that compelled this to happen,
14:37 but this kind of sets up the American view of sort of the car hierarchy.
14:42 The station wagon's kind of always been on the bottom.
14:45 It still is today a little bit.
14:47 It's sort of the, you've given up and you have the two-seat Italian sports car with no roof on.
14:52 And it's like, what am I doing here? Where did it go wrong?
14:56 This is another example of the TS configuration.
15:01 They never made a full Spyder of the 308.
15:04 Some people would know this as the Targa top.
15:07 That's what Porsche used in their nomenclature.
15:09 And there was a place to store your convertible top behind the seats when it was not needed.
15:14 And I think most people drove it with the top off most of the time.
15:17 It's a little bit awkward with this sort of outdoor quality vinyl over the top.
15:22 And especially in bright colored cars, it really breaks up the shape of the car.
15:26 And this is the classic configuration, red tan Ferrari.
15:29 The newest guy.
15:33 [Music]
15:45 Here we see Tom Cruise driving a 250 GTO.
15:48 Pretty undisputably the ultimate Ferrari to own.
15:51 They made 36 in total.
15:53 These weren't particularly successful cars in terms of racing.
15:57 Most of them, well, all of them really went to sort of private customers.
16:02 But it's as beautiful as it gets when it comes to car design.
16:06 Those half moon vents we see in the beginning are a really iconic part of this car.
16:10 They ended up having to change those later.
16:12 But you can see the sliding windows, the competition fueler on the outside.
16:16 These were cars that were meant to go racing,
16:18 but are ultimately actually very usable sort of conventional cars.
16:24 Another replica, you know, they got a lot right, but wheels, the shields, the chrome,
16:30 a lot of details are off on it.
16:32 Not in a way that's, again, affects things.
16:35 We get what they're trying to say here.
16:37 If this was a real car today, it's, you know, approaching $100 million,
16:41 maybe over $100 million.
16:43 It is sort of the dream to wake up one day and have the streets of Manhattan to yourself.
16:47 As well as all the street parking you see on the Upper West Side and those sort of opening shots.
16:51 I mean, that might be the most sort of fantastical part of it.
16:55 Tower Heist.
16:58 This is why we say classic cars are a great investment.
17:13 They're actually all gold underneath and it's just a good place to put your money.
17:17 The 250 Lusso. This is one of the first truly comfort production cars that Ferrari ever made.
17:24 Lusso means luxury.
17:26 All of the chrome trim around the windows, the bumpers,
17:29 the playful exhausts that extend out and are polished.
17:33 These are all things you didn't used to see on Ferraris,
17:35 because they were detriments to performance.
17:38 But there was a growing demand for these cars by the 60s already.
17:42 You know, Ferrari won so many races, everybody wanted the winning car.
17:45 But people still wanted something comfortable.
17:48 So this was plush.
17:49 When these cars came out, I mean, they even inflation adjusted.
17:53 They weren't terribly expensive.
17:54 You didn't necessarily need to be a billionaire to own one.
17:58 And there's lots of great stories of sort of people who just saved enough to buy their Ferrari.
18:03 So the Lusso is a car today that's really popular with collectors.
18:07 They've been refurbished maybe to a standard better than they ever were new.
18:11 And those will get over a million dollars.
18:13 Scent of a woman.
18:15 Al Pacino is driving probably one of the worst Ferraris ever made.
18:28 But in one of my favorite car scenes, Ferrari scenes in film,
18:33 they do a great job of setting this car up,
18:36 because they walk into a dealership on Park Avenue,
18:39 trying to take out a Testarossa.
18:41 They are roundly mocked and said,
18:44 "But for a couple grand, I'll let you drive the Mondial."
18:47 That's the same way the Mondial is sort of viewed today.
18:50 It's like, "Yeah, if you want a box, I'll let you drive this thing."
18:52 It's a little ungainly, awkward convertible top, not very fast.
18:56 There were a few versions that had sort of an upgraded handling package,
19:00 which are very cool.
19:01 But these are really cheap cars today.
19:05 [Tires screeching]
19:07 [Sirens wailing]
19:09 "Hug it in!"
19:12 "Oh, Charlie!"
19:14 The scene itself is great.
19:16 Watching Al Pacino, who plays a blind army colonel,
19:19 sort of be taught to drive by his caretaker.
19:22 And it gets into a point later where he has to try and talk himself out of a ticket,
19:27 which is always a hard thing to do in a Ferrari.
19:29 You already look guilty.
19:30 But he manages to get it done without the cop realizing that he's blind
19:34 and driving through the streets of Brooklyn.
19:36 I think if you asked the Ferrari world,
19:39 99% of the people would tell you the Mondial is the one not to own.
19:43 It's a little too large, a little too heavy,
19:45 especially from this period of time.
19:47 I would rather a 328, which, you know, you're going to be paying three times as much,
19:50 but I think you're getting three times as much car, too.
19:53 The Fast and the Furious.
19:57 More than you can afford, pal. Ferrari.
20:00 Smoke.
20:05 This scene really, I think there are probably quite a few Ferrari owners
20:13 who felt called out by this.
20:15 You buy a Ferrari because, you know, you've made it,
20:18 you've got enough money to afford one.
20:20 At some point you realize that being able to afford one
20:23 doesn't necessarily make you capable of driving one
20:26 or even mean that it's going to be faster than a lot of cars a fraction of the price.
20:30 It's no secret you could save a lot of money by buying a Supra at the time
20:34 with the money you save by a giant turbo, whatever else,
20:37 and you can out-drag a Ferrari for sure.
20:40 You know, the truth, though, is today, these roles would actually be reversed.
20:44 If you had the on-screen car, this Supra from Fast and Furious,
20:48 it's worth quite a bit more than the 355.
20:51 Even if you've got a bone-stock sport roof,
20:54 a Supra today with low miles that's been unmodified,
20:57 it's potentially more valuable than the 355.
21:00 The Rock.
21:03 Yeah, the shifting stands out.
21:15 I mean, it's the classic, you know, car driving in movies is
21:18 if you want to go faster, you shift,
21:20 which is really not what you want to be doing.
21:23 You shift when you have to because you've run out of engine.
21:26 Really, you want to hold it at a higher RPM range, typically.
21:29 He's also really yanking on it, which doesn't help.
21:33 There's no need. You want to be quick,
21:35 but there's no need to sort of really rip it in there.
21:38 This is a car where you could still get a gated manual transmission.
21:42 The gearbox has slots for each of the gears
21:46 to make sure you're going into the right one.
21:48 It also offers a really satisfying click when you do.
21:51 You don't hear that in this movie when he shifts,
21:54 which is sort of a miss, I would think.
21:56 This is the full spider here.
22:01 You can see where the top folds completely into the car.
22:04 There's no C-pillar that sort of stays up.
22:06 Nicolas Cage, famous car guy, loves his Ferraris.
22:09 But yeah, he's really selling that 2-3 shift right there.
22:13 Bad Boys 2.
22:15 [Music]
22:17 [Music]
22:22 We see the guys driving a 550 Maranello.
22:25 Full disclosure, entirely biased,
22:28 as I'm proud owner of a 1997 550 Maranello.
22:31 Here's a case where Ferrari provided real cars taking damage.
22:35 I wouldn't be surprised if Ferrari cooperated with them
22:38 to sort of allow this to happen,
22:40 but these are real 550 Maranellos being driven,
22:43 and this sounds like a 550.
22:45 These cars mark the beginning of the Montezuma-era Ferrari,
22:51 who became the chairman in the '90s
22:53 and wanted to take Ferrari back to a lot of its roots.
22:56 This car is a front-engine, naturally aspirated,
22:59 12-cylinder with three pedals, manual transmission.
23:03 It really did ascribe to that sort of original Ferrari recipe.
23:07 And you can see the shields on the side,
23:10 the yellow skidetto.
23:12 This is something you saw only on Ferrari's racing cars in the '60s,
23:16 with the Cavallino Rampante, the prancing horse on the side.
23:19 Starting in this era, brilliant marketing move,
23:21 but you could optionally get these shields as part of your car.
23:24 It's a little bit more of an old man's Ferrari, I guess,
23:27 in that, you know, again, front-engined, 12-cylinder.
23:30 And for a lot of people, if it doesn't have 12 cylinders,
23:33 it's not a Ferrari.
23:34 I'm not one of those people, but 12 cylinders doesn't hurt.
23:37 Charlie's Angels, full throttle.
23:41 [music]
23:43 Here we've got Demi Moore, straight out of the ocean and into her Enzo,
23:53 which, you know, at the time, this was only a $600,000 car,
23:57 so I guess you didn't need to worry about drying off first.
24:00 The Ferrari Enzo is one of the first hyper cars.
24:03 If you take off all the exterior panels,
24:05 what you see underneath is basically one of their Formula 1 cars.
24:09 This is a very serious piece of kit.
24:11 Today, they're worth around $3 million, let's call it,
24:14 some less, some more.
24:15 Only 400 were made.
24:17 One was gifted to the Pope.
24:18 They called it the Enzo, and I think that tells you
24:21 how seriously they took this car,
24:23 if they were going to put Enzo Ferrari's name on it.
24:26 It's funny because Enzo was always against a mid-engine car for the street.
24:31 Ferrari road cars were traditionally always front-engined,
24:33 so in a lot of ways, I'm not sure this is what he would have wanted to see,
24:37 but in terms of putting forward a sort of technical masterpiece,
24:41 they managed to skin a Formula 1 car in a body that would work.
24:46 Today, this is fully cemented as a collector car,
24:49 and it's part of the lineage of super cars that Ferrari produced,
24:54 starting with the 280 GTO.
24:56 It was called then the F40, F50, the Enzo, and now the LaFerrari.
25:01 Those are cars that are seen as the Ferrari super cars of each era.
25:06 (upbeat music)

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