OK, there’s been this story twittering around out there about Ferrari and the Italian Police (con Caribinieri) broke up this “ring” of guys selling replica Ferraris built on Fiero chassis.
In Italy.
Oh sure, no one’s gonna notice in fricking ITALY you morons.
Funny thing is, Ferrari goes kind of ape like that every so often … there was a story a while back that I read in R&T or C&D about this French guy who was making exact copies of 250 GTOs. Everything was metal, he hand formed the bodies out of aluminum, all of the running gear was taken from old, crashed Ferraris, even the V12 engines.
Experts said that they couldn’t tell the real from the copy, even when they were up on a rack.
The guy finished two of them, sold them, and Ferrari came to his shop outside of Milan with something like 50 SWAT guys and 4 or 5 big trucks … took away everything he had; 2 half-completed cars, all of the tooling, shop drawings, the lot.
Sued the living bejeebus out of him too, but before it could come to trial, he was found shot & killed.
Turns out that he was financially tied to some highly unsavory characters with ties to, uh, money obtained via questionable means (via Turkey as I recall).
Anyway this is all a very roundabout way of mentioning that the fellows over at Los Jalops are trying to start a feud with, of all people, Stephen Colbert, claiming that he appropriated the most recent “counterfeit Ferrari” story.
I’ve got to say though, his technique for telling a real Ferrari from a fake Ferrari seems quite workable.
Video is here.
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