Ferrari Challenge Pt. 1 Miller Motor Sports Park

Well, finally some action around these parts. The MMSP hosted the Ferrari Challenge for the first time in Utah, which brought some very exotic cars and a fine afternoon to the state. Several years ago, Larry Miller, the auto king of Utah (and a few other states) financed probably the best racing facility in the country out in the Tooele valley. Larry had always been a racing fan (a conversation with him in the grocery store years ago yielded info on his extensive Cobra and Ford racing car collection, which are now in the museum that's part of the Miller Motor Sports Park). However, the facility so far is underutilized, other than a LeMans series race and some motorcycle action. My favorite Classic Car races ran a couple years, but haven't been rescheduled. I guess Utah is just too remote for big time action. But the track is so fabulous, I'm sure that will change.

So this past weekend, with decent weather for early April (warm enough for fans, cool enough for high performance engines), the Ferrari Challenge came to town. The FC is a series of races for Ferrari owners who are amateur drivers with dealer support. They get to race F430's and Ferrari gets to demo their latest performance cars. At the same time, all sorts of local Ferrari owners get to strut their stuff (cars). A big celebration. So I start a series of blogs, first with the scene and the cars that lined up for us peons to ogle. A very nice scene with snow packed Ochres to the east and snow packed Stansburys to the west. As always, click on the pics to get a bigger view.



Now some individual cars. First and older Ferrari, don't remember the model.

And, I believe, a Berlinetta, and a convertible F430:

I'm not much into yellow cars, unless they are Ferraris:

And the new Ferrari California:

When it comes to exotic sports cars, most folds are into the gorgeous body work, or the high performance engines. For some reason, I'm into the brakes, especially colorful calipers. You gotta stop these cars, pull 'em down from 100+ speeds in a short distance, without brake fade.
(There was a lot of action in the garage after track time blowing out the brake dust from under the wheel wells). So here's a couple brake pics:


At the top of this post is a pic of my friend, Fred, posing with an F430. He often attends these events with his buddy Davie who is an excellent photographer:

Davie does the photos, Fred applies a little Photoshop and then prints out the pics in large format. They have a little biz going, since owners often enjoy the large prints of their cars. But when it comes to photographers, I enjoy the young babes with a camera:

OK, enough for this post. Coming up, the F599XX, the FXX, and more on F430s, and some bonus pics of other interesting cars on display at the big Ferrari event.