Nothing but pasta could possibly be more representative of Italian sumptuousness than Ferrari, the sexy luxury race car brand that made its debut in 1947 with the 125S, produced in Maranello, Italy, and bearing the Ferrari trademark. Maranello, near the city of Modena, has been Ferrari’s home from the firm’s inception, and the main museum dedicated to the firm’s famous fast cars, as well as its assembly line and various factories are all situated there.

The Ferrari museum, opened just more than a year after Enzo Ferrari’s death in 1990, gets over 200,000 visitors a year from all corners of the globe, who come to ogle and drool over their favorite models—from the Ferrari 125S and 166 Inter all the way up to the Ferrari FF—at close range. The expo shows off cars past and present across its 2,500-meter space, including rare vintage models and a well-stocked trophy hall.

Truly impressive to the engineering-minded, however, is the company’s large factory, situated right next to the museum and designed with employees and technology in mind. The plant, or the “Ferrari citadel” as it’s referred to, has expanded and evolved over its six decades of existence, with famous architects like Renzo Piano, Jean Nouvel, Marco Visconti, Massimiliano Fuksas and Luigi Sturchio all leaving their indelible mark on the complex.

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Ferrari has done its utmost to ensure that its factory employees—who are treated to a wide range of services from free family medical exams to schoolbooks for their children, gyms and subsidized loans—work in the most comfortable environment possible. Bright, climate controlled, noise reduction and green spaces abound, and indeed, the factory recently won the “Best Place to Work in Europe” award.

In June 2009, Ferrari even opened its own trigeneration center (a system which combines heat, cooling and power production) at its plant, one of the largest in Italy and the first to be adopted by a company manufacturing sports cars.

Together with the photovoltaic power plant installed on the roof of Ferrari’s mechanical workshop in 2008, the trigneration system—representing a 10 million Euro investment—makes the factory almost fully autonomous in terms of power generation. What little energy the factory does need from external sources, the company sources from renewable energy supplies, which has led to an apparent 40 percent reduction in C02 emissions (some 40,000 metric tons) in 2010 alone.

The factory buildings were specially designed with both style and incredible amounts of functionality in mind, from Renzo Piano’s Wind Tunnel  building completed in 2007 and resembling a part of an engine, to Marco Visconti’s visually stunning aluminium and opal glass paint shop, designed to minimize contact between the workers and toxic materials.

The central element of the Wind Tunnel building is a tubular duct 80 meters long where air flow can be artificially generated and modified for turbulence, angularity and uniformity. The turbine guarantees an airflow of about 250 kph for models in 1:2 scale and of about 150 kph for 1:1 scale models as well as real cars. Thanks to a mechanism controlled by over 300 sensors and a conveyor belt that is synchronized with the wind speed, Ferrari's engineers can simulate and monitor practically every movement of the various models, from rolling to yawing, pitching and swerving.

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Engineering engines that purr

The mechanical workshop, too, was built with advanced technology in mind, as was the new logistics Ges, a long hangar-like building designed by Sturchio Architects & Designers where the logistic heart of the Ferrari team is located.

It’s the eight-level paint shop, however, that is probably most impressive facility at the Ferrari plant. Designed by Marco Visconti and opened in 2004, the paint shop is a magnificent structure of aluminum and opal glass, interspersed with clear insets which serve as an adjusting filter to the outside weather conditions, which helps to cut down on energy.

Controlled by one operating and control center, the building was constructed in such a way as to ensure that contact between the workers and the materials used by the paint shop remained at a minimum. The powder-based primer and water-based paints are applied in a process of pre-treatment and cataphoresis in a tunnel where the car bodies are immersed and rotated 360 degrees in eleven successive tanks, without any human intervention whatsoever.

Ferrari even has its own foundry on site, mainly to manufacture primary aluminium alloys as well as to manufacture parts for engines and bodywork. Engine parts are cast by means of sand molds and gravity die casting for what Ferrari maintains is “the best mechanical performance.”

There are also two prominent engine assembly lines in the Ferrari complex, for the production of the iconic eight and 12-cylinder engines. The 12-cylinder line is reserved for the most experienced workers, who carry out all of the final assembly operations and sign the technical sheet of the engine.

The eight-cylinder engine base is manufactured in the foundry unit by casting aluminium with 7 percent silicon (at approximately 760 degrees centigrade) into a shell.

Inside cavities are formed using sand cores, which are then discarded during thermal processes. When finished, the eight-cylinder engine weighs about 45 kilos and still features the so-called “sprues," aluminium appendages resulting from the casting process, which are then discarded in subsequent stages. After casting, all pieces undergo tempering and aging heat treatments, as well as several dimension and structural conformity controls, before being sent on to the mechanical motor unit.

The 12 cylinder engine—the Ferrari engine by definition—takes about 20 days to make and also undergoes several stages, from mechanical work to heat treatment and finishing. With a sound that is hard to reproduce anywhere else, the engine is considered by many to be a piece of engineering excellence, and even a work of art.  The 12-cylinder engine loses about 50 percent of its weight over the course of the entire engine manufacturing process.

The 12-cylinder head, too, requires several stages of production, including the checking of seals against oil and water, completing the valve train group and the superfinishing. The process is almost entirely automated and performed through a thermal interference process, whereby the valve seat is cooled with liquid nitrogen to 196 degrees centigrade, which reduces its volume from 40 to 60 microns. At the same time, the head is warmed up to 160 degrees centigrade, which increases its volume by 0.12 to 0.15 square millimeters.

Robots then place the valve seat into the cylinder head, and once done, the entire head is plunged into water. The thermal shock makes the coupling with the seat indissoluble.

“The sound of the engine is something that reinforces the emotion of driving a Ferrari,” explained Mariella Mengozzi, the museum manager., According to Mengozzi, Ferrari doesn't just sell cars, it sells dreams.

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Designed for mechanical perfection

Ferrari currently manufactures over 6,000 cars a year, and its current models like the 458 Italia, the 599 GTB Fiorano, the California and the FF continue in the tradition of the firm’s historic fusion of technology and style. “The design in Ferrari is something very peculiar because it has always been linked to functionality,” said Mengozzi, noting that the firm has always been highly focused on the car’s mechanics. The first priority was always the engine and the transmission, followed by the other mechanical components of the car, only after which the design and style of the chassis came into play.

The design of the cars was very much linked to the mechanical interiors of the car, said Mendozzi, so the shape of the chassis was often the way it was to cover mechanical features like the battery. Aerodynamics didn’t yet exist at the time when the original cars were produced, just a sense of how the car could be more effective, she explained. Only in the early 1960s did the first wind features begin to appear on the Ferrari cars.

Racing has always been central to Ferrari’s DNA, too. Since the victory of the 125S in the Rome Grand Prix in 1947, Ferrari has won over 5,000 races on circuits worldwide. It is the only manufacturer to have participated in all seasons of the Formula 1 World Championship, since its establishment in 1950 and, so far, the company has won 16 Constructors’ World Titles and 15 Drivers’ World Titles.

One odd and little known fact about Ferraris, however, is that their striking red color was not initially a brand decision. In the early 20th century when car competitions started out, the racing association, the FIA, had ruled that every car constructor should be recognized by national colors. Thus, all French cars were blue, all British cars were green, German cars were white, and the Italian cars were all red.

In the 1960s, when the costs of production soared and the developers went looking for sponsors, advertisers asked to gain more visibility by displaying different brand colors, so the FIA had to relax and eventually give up its rule on national colors. Enzo Ferrari, however, decided to always stay red when competing, establishing a strong brand link. “When you see a red car racing, you think it’s a Ferrari car,” said Mengozzi. The range of reds available for Ferraris though is still pretty wide, though several of the more popular red colors include the traditional Rosso Corsa, Rosso Maranello and Rosso China.

As to which of the Ferrari cars reigns supreme, however, the company’s engineers seem to be living up to Enzo Ferrari’s motto of “the best car is always the next one.”