This past weekend, I had the opportunity to finally witness some of the most exquisite machines to have ever left Maranello, in action at none other than the world famous Mazda Raceway at Laguna Seca in Monterey, California. After drooling over these cars over the internet for most of my teenage years, I finally had an opportunity to have some face to face time, and really get to see why these cars are even more special than I had originally imagined.
On display and exhibition was Ferrari’s entire line of modern era race cars, including 6 different Formula One cars. Two of the most exciting cars in attendance were the championship clinching F2001 and F2004 of Michael Schumacher, a Rubens Barichello driven and also championship winning F2003, a Jacky Ickx driven 312B, Gerhard Berger’s F189 which introduced the paddle-shift gearbox to F1, and a Ferrari F2007 that would later go on to win the championship in the hands on Finnish racing sensation, Kimi Raikkonen.
If you could bring yourself to break the hypnotism that an F1 car generates, you’d immediately notice that they weren’t the only jewels present in the crown that was the Laguna Seca Paddock. It might be a bit hard to process anything else around you when you have an F2004 blowing fumes and flames inches from your face, but directly to the right of the F1 garage, was the FXX/599XX garage that held an even more staggering presence in numbers. Although there were only 3 FXX’s present…(yes, I laughed a little too), there were more 599XX’s than I cared to count, so I’ll let the pictures do the talking….
A massive thank you to friend & F1 driver Robert “Bud” Moeller for letting me get up close and personal with these otherwise untouchable machines!
-Arya
