JANUARY 25, 2006

That big building next door

Redefining the meaning of the word "manufacturer" is all the rage at the moment. Just before the recent Monte Carlo Rally the rallying world found that manufacturer did not mean what it had previously meant and that private teams could suddenly call themselves factory teams thanks to a redefining of the term by the sporting authorities. Now Ferrari President Luca di Montezemolo has told the press that Ferrari is "a private team" which does not have the support of the FIAT. That may be the case but the term "private team" is somewhat misleading given that near the Formula 1 factory is a 94,000 sq m factory which produces around 4,300 high-performance road cars every year, with the prices starting at around $150,000 a car. The last available records suggest that the company had sales of $1bn in 2004.

That sounds a bit like manufacturing to us.