355 Buying experience of brand new 355 in the 90’s??

I’ve searched and there doesn’t seem to be much talk of what the buying experience of a brand new 355 during the 90’s was like. For those fortunate to have had that experience, can you share?


What did you know about the car? What didn’t you know about the car? How informative were the sales people? Were you aware of all the options? Were you swayed towards buying a certain spec? Or did you simply buy what caught your attention in the showroom floor?


Someone on BaT recently asked why there are so few 355’s with carbon sport seats in the U.S. I think that is an interesting question, which makes you wonder how the cars were purchased or pre-ordered during the period and how informative were the buyers and salespersons.



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https://www.nsxfiles.com/ferrari_fever.htm

 

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“In September (1998), I decide that I just have to have an F355 F1 GTS(removable hardtop). I figure that with the top off, it will feel like a convertible, yet I could throw the top on, and still be able to take it to "informal" drive arounds at the track. Jeff calls the GTS and Spiders "poseur cars", and only real men get the Berlinetta like he did. I call the local Ferrari dealers. They don’t have one in stock. I call the dealers in California. Also none in stock. I call dealers all over the US. None in stock. Damn. I call Ferrari of Beverly Hills, and they say that F355 GTS are pretty rare, Red/Tan more rare, and with F1 shifter, even more rare. If I order today, (September), I might get it in January or February. But no promises, as cars get done when they get done. It’s the Italian way. They are not on a production schedule like your typical car. They drink wine on their lunch breaks. I end up putting my deposit down for the car, and get the carbon fiber racing seats with leather, red brake calipers, and painted hardtop roof as options. (Note, I plan to keep my NSX as a track car and daily driver, but use the F355 for crusing down PCH).



Wayne looking at two of five used cars in the Ferrari of Beverly Hills Showroom

It was kinda weird at the Ferrari dealership, as there are only five cars in the show room. Five used cars. Wayne and I laugh, as we feel it is kinda of a rinky-dink dealership, since they don’t have any new cars. If ya want new, ya gotta tell em what you want, and they will order it and get your own car built exactly how you want it. Wayne is looking hard at the Red/Tan F355 Spider in the showroom, and is asking James the salesman a bunch of questions. Wayne is doing the calculations in his head and talking to himself, "If I sell the NSX, pay off the remainder of the loan, and sell a couple more phone systems a month, , sell the Rolex, sell the engagement ring that I an no longer going to use, I can make the payments….hummmm….

September goes by. October. November. December. January. I call Bryant, and ask him where my car is. He says they should be finishing it up soon, and then they will put it on the boat. He says he will call me when it hits the water. Middle of January or so, Bryant calls, and says it in on the water, headed this way on the east coast. Last part of January, Bryant says it is on the east coast. It has to go through customs, get put on a transporter, and since we are in Southern California, it will be the last stop for the transporter as it drops cars off between the east coast and here.”

 

Jeff - 1999 Silver GTB with carbon seats, silver calipers, F1.

Wayne - 1998 Giallo manual GTS.

 

The car that caught Wayne's eye.....yellow F355 GTS at Armen's shop

A couple of days later, Wayne is getting his car cleaned at the car wash next to Newport Autosports. He calls me up and says, "Hey, I am getting my car washed, and I look next door, and Armen just got in a 1998 F355 GTS in yellow/black, with 4000 miles on it, and 18 months left on the factory warranty. Dennis Rodman is in here also, trying to buy a Bentley. Come on down". I drive down, and Wayne is trying to get more info on the car, as well as figure out the purchase price. Wayne is thinking that this is a cherry looking car. It is yellow, which looks pretty stunning. Rodman is in there, negotiating to try to buy the white Bentley that is in there.

Friday, February 19th. Wayne pulls the trigger. He decides to get the yellow F355 GTS at Armen’s. Today’s the Day! We go down there, but Armen isn’t really open yet, so he can’t do the financing. His finance guy is working on getting the deal through someone, but we can tell it ain’t going smoothly, as this is their first one. They have to establish relationships with banks, financing people, etc, as they are starting from ground zero. We agree to come back on Saturday.

Saturday, February 20th – Today’s the Day! Sun is shining, it is 70+ degrees out, a perfect day for cruising an F355 GTS with the top off. But, still no financing, especially since it is Saturday, no banks are open. Wayne is itching for the car. Too bad, we could have been driving up and down PCH all day long, bursting to 8500 RPMs every now and then.

Sunday, February 21st – still no financing. Wayne drives down to Symbolic in Los Angeles, and looks at a yellow F355 Spider with 1200 miles on it. Except that the warranty runs out in a month. Probably not a good deal, especially with the way we drive cars. Sunday night, Wayne can’t decide if he wants the Spider or the GTS. I tell him the GTS is better, because since he is going to sell his NSX:

1. It gets cold in the winter. You will need the top on a lot at night. Spider would give you lots of wind noise, and it doesn’t look all that good with top on.
2. Even driving the GTS for an hour with the top off is fatiguing, from all the wind hitting you. In a Spider, this would be multiplied by two
3. With the GTS, if you need to park the car at night somewhere, you can put the hard top on to secure the car. With the Spider, you just have the cloth top.
4. GTS at Armen’s comes with 18 month warranty, the Spider only comes with 1 month warranty.
5. Armen said that if Wayne bought the GTS from him, he would take us for a cruise in his F50……..obviously I want Wayne to buy the GTS from him!

Monday, February 22nd – Today’s the Day! Except that we find out that Armen has to sell the car to Fletcher Jones Motorcars(the big Mercedes dealer) and then Fletcher has to sell it to Wayne, so we can take advantage of Fletcher’s financing, since Armen isn’t setup for financing. Armen used to work at Fletcher, so he knows them pretty well. We are ready to get rocking and rolling with the deal. Wayne is ready to drive off into the sunset in his yellow F355 GTS. Except the main financing person at Fletcher for a special deal like this is on vacation. We have to wait ANOTHER DAY. Armen is profusely apologizing for the delay in selling the car. It really isn’t his fault. He isn’t supposed to be open for business for another couple of weeks, and we are on his doorstep begging him to sell Wayne the F355, and he is trying to do everything he can to get us the car.


Tuesday, February 23rd – Today’s the Day! We go to Armen’s place to pickup the F355, so we can take it to a mechanic’s shop down the road to get it checked out. Except Wayne is 80 minutes late. So the guy at the mechanic’s shop who was supposed to check it out is busy now, and can’t do it until 2:00 p.m. or so. At 3:00 p.m., we go to pickup the car. I go there with Wayne in my F355, and Armen shows up in a Black Diablo SV that he just bought (so he could add that to the cars that he is selling). Now the plan is to take my F355, Wayne’s soon to be F355, and the Diablo over to Fletcher to seal the deal, so we can drive off with Wayne’s car. It is about 80 degrees today, PERFECT weather for driving an F355 GTS. Except we have a problem with the financing, since Fletcher doesn’t normally sell Ferraris, and the bank doesn’t have their "financing tables" setup for an F355. We are haggling over prices, balloon payments, etc. Wayne is looking for monthly payments to be reasonable, and I keep telling Wayne that monthly payments are irrelevant, the main thing is minimum down payment, and keep as much money in Cisco and Microsoft as possible, since these stocks will probably go up, and then just stretchout the payments as long as possible, even if they are expensive. If all goes well, he can pay for the car in full a year or two down the line from the stock profits. (Interest is 10.5% a year on a used car, Cisco and Microsoft have gone up about 100% in the past year. Hummmm…I wonder where I should keep my money???) Bottom line is that they need to charge Wayne an extra 1000 bucks over what he thought he was going to pay, but it won’t affect the financing quote that he got earlier. The reason for the extra $1000 bucks is that Fletcher says that they found out they are now unable to make money on the financing deal, but if they charge a 1000 more upfront, they can also make the monthly payments lower, and Wayne’s down payment and balloon payment won’t change. This confuses Wayne, as how can it be cheaper if he is paying more? I tell Wayne don’t worry about it, it sounds okay to me, as long as the other payments that were agreed upon are not more, and we got minimum down payment. Wayne wants to call a financing friend, so we page him, fax him documents, etc. In the meantime, the sun is going down quickly……..Armen is bummed that the deal is taking so long. We tell him not to worry, we understand that he ain’t formally open yet.

6:00 p.m. Three hours later, we are FINALLY ready to finish the deal. Wayne is ready to sign, but the finance guy comes back and says, "uh…..we need to get confirmation of the balloon payment, but since we don’t do Ferrari’s, it isn’t in our "financing book", so we have to re-verify with Chase Manhattan Bank that all our numbers are correct. Except the local Chase Manhattan Bank can’t verify balloon payment on an F355, as it isn’t on their books either, so they have to get special approvals from headquarters. Unfortunately, headquarters is back east, and they are closed. Armen is really frustrated that this is taking so long to sell his first car, I am frustrated because I have spent about 40 hours the past week looking at F355s with Wayne and listening to financing numbers, and Wayne is every more frustrated as he just wants to drive off in the damn car and make it go "wheyyyyyyy……..wheeyyyy" off into the sunset. So now, we got to take the Yellow GTS back to Armen’s shop. Wayne drives the yellow GTS, I have my GTS, and Armen has the Diablo, and we go blasting three abreast down Jamboree Blvd as darkness falls. The Diablo has an aftermarket Tubi exhaust, and sounds big, mean and throaty. The two F355s sound like Schumacher and Irvine ripping down the straightaway, passing each other back and forth, revving on each other.


We get back to Armen’s, and he has just taken delivery on a yellow 550 Maranello and a yellow F355 Spider. It just so happens that he bought the other car that Wayne was looking at over at Symbolic in Los Angeles. Wayne says, "Hey, I almost bought that car on Sunday". Armen kiddingly mentions, "You told me the other day you were looking at a yellow F355 at Symbolic, so I bought it. I will buy up all the cars that Wayne may want, so he HAS to buy from me…."

So I take Wayne back home, who is totally dejected that he still doesn’t have a car, he has missed about 20 hour of work the past couple of days screwing around with trying to buy this car. We go to Larry’s for pizza, (it is really called Mossimo’s, but for some wrong reason five years ago we thought it was called Larry’s, so we still call it Larry’s even though that is NOT the name of the place, and no one named Larry works there…..)

Wednesday, February 24th, The Day!
Now it has been five days since Wayne said, "I’ll buy the car". At the very last minute now, Chase Manhattan wants an amendment saying that a max 5000 free miles per year, anything over that is a penalty. Wayne goes ballistic. He is BUYING the car, NOT leasing. But Chase is trying to protect themselves if someone buys the car, drives it 30,000 miles in year one, and then goes bankrupt, and then tries to return the car to them. If Wayne keeps the car for five years and pays the balloon payment, then the car is his to keep, and it doesn’t matter how many miles he puts on it.

A couple of days ago, Jeff called me and said he wants to go to Kiwi Auto and have them install a five point harness in his F355. I tell him to ditch work, as Wayne is buying an F355, and we can probably scam a ride in the F50. I tell Jeff to met us at Armen’s at 9:30 a.m. Jeff, being a big time Ferrari nut(He is the editor for the Southwest Ferrari Newsletter) agrees to blow off work. Unfortunately, Wayne is way late. We don’t get to Armen’s until 10:30. Then, we find out that we have to go back to Fletcher Jones Mercedes, to have Wayne sign an "amendment" to the deal he signed the day before. We take my F355, Jeff’s F355, and Wayne’s soon to be purchased F355 to Fletcher. Now this is pretty cool, hearing three F355’s screaming down Pacific Coast Highway. We get there, sign the papers, and the car is finally Wayne’s. It’s done!”





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Buying a GTS or Berlinetta wasn’t easy in the late 90’s .

 

Newport Autosport 1999-2000



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I’m only posting snippets from the blog in case the link goes dark someday. Story is a gem.

 

Pretty sure Newport Autosport is in the exact location as today’s Ferrari of Newport Beach. And yes… there is still a car wash next door!



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Here’s a link to an assortment of brochures and press releases.

https://albaco.com/search?page=1&q=Ferrari+f355+brochure

 

@ag512bbi

 

It should be worth noting… the Silver F1 B & Red F1 GTS in the story were eventually converted to manual many years later.

 

Here’s an F1 GTS with 1k miles!

https://rockstarcarauction.com/view/1999-ferrari-355-gts/279ae7f0-cc6c-4cc8-4a4f-08dbb6b1dc96