Cavallino Florida, Enzo Cruise-In California Celebrate Our Love of Ferraris

You can buy any car made if all you want is a car. There are Toyota Camrys and Ford Edges galore that will get you, your family, and all your groceries safely to wherever you want to go. But this isn’t about those cars. This is about the car brand that makes fiscally conservative financial planners throw caution and their 401Ks to the wind, that makes young drivers swoon and old drivers weep. Why, can we say definitively, do we love Ferraris?

Everyone has a reason. Ed Gilbertson, retired chief class judge for Ferraris (and eventually all classes) at Pebble—and a guy lucky enough to have owned many of the greatest Ferraris in his lifetime—recalled when it happened for him.

“My first station when I was called to active duty in 1959 was March Air Force Base,” he told Ferrari Club Magazine Sempre Ferrari. “I loaded up my Healey with what few possessions I had and headed down to Riverside, only to very quickly discover that Riverside Raceway was right next to the base.

“I was in the officer barracks and another fella said, ‘Ed, big race over at the track, would you like to go?’ We went over to what wound up being the 1959 LA Times Grand Prix, and that’s where I saw and heard my first Ferrari.”

Not just any Ferrari. It was Phil Hill driving a 250 Testa Rossa—in the same race that featured Stirling Moss in a Maserati and Lance Reventlow in a Scarab.

“We’re standing down at the end of a straight and here comes this Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa and this thing just screamed by… It was just the most fantastic sound I’d ever heard and the car was absolutely beautiful…”

That did it for Ed. What followed was a lifetime of Ferraris: A Lusso first, then a 275 GTB, 166MM Barchetta, Spyder California, all the way up to an F355.

Jim Bindman is the president of the Ferrari Club of America Southwest Region, and his passion for the brand was stoked by a car in his SoCal neighborhood.

“In Westchester growing up, my neighbor, his daily driver was a GTO,” Bindman recalled. “One of the last three, with the different roofline, the ‘64. And I remember every afternoon hearing that car go by when he was going home from work. And since then I always wanted a Ferrari. Well, finally in 1990 I was in a position where I could buy the cheapest Ferrari, which, at the time, 20 years ago, 23 years ago, was a 308.”

Things were different then.

“I found a 308 in Malibu with its original owner—red/tan, for $30,000. So we drove to Malibu, we test drove it, and we bought the car.”