If you’re crazy rich, you can pay Ferrari to be a test driver

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  Let me tell you, the noise of all these V12s roaring at the same time is a symphony performance few petrolheads could forget. [credit: Ferrari ]

MONTEREY, Calif.—”Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.” Those words were written by F. Scott Fitzgerald back in 1926, and they remain true almost a century later. It’s certainly true when it comes to cars, where having a telephone number bank balance opens doors to machinery that the rest of us only ever get close to in video games. Recently, I got a chance to take a peek behind that curtain at the historic Laguna Seca racetrack in California.

Once upon a time, the supercar was the top of the tree, and cars like the McLaren F1 and Ferrari Enzo re-wrote the rules on how fast a car could go and how much it would cost. Before too long, that kind of performance trickled down—even a Tesla P100D will beat either of those cars in a race to 100mph, for example—and so we got the hypercar.

Carbon fiber hybrids with around 1,000hp on tap and seven-digit price tags became the new apex predators of the car world, but for some, even these are now too common, too pedestrian. So what do you do if you’ve got several million dollars burning a hole in your pocket and you want to go fast, really, really fast? For a certain kind of person, the answer is, you call up Ferrari and ask about its Corsa Clienti program.