DSC’s chat with Ronnie Kessel was arranged for the day following the ELMS round at Mugello in Italy, but at Kessel’s home base in Lugano Switzerland.
So how to get there? DSC’s rental car was required to get the Deputy Ed home.
No problem, with the utmost friendly attitude, Ronnie Kessel (you can read our extended interview with him here) offered to give us a ride to Lugano in his car.
And what a car! It was a stunning Ferrari GTC4 Lusso – A mighty, and mightily sonorous, 6.2 litre V12 pushing out no less than 690 bhp!
And ‘our’ example was clad in the wholly appropriate shade described by Ferrari as ‘Rosso Mugello’ – Yes a red Ferrari, but a deep shade, impressive without being ‘in your face’.
The drive from Mugello to Lugano is something around 3-4 hours – and much of it is on heavily trafficked Italian Autostrada.
The big, unexpected, surprise came when someone said “Would you like to drive it?”
That gave us the opportunity to sample – repeatedly – two Italian ‘experiences’: The response of Italian road users to a Ferrari – predictably smiling and ‘encouraging’!
And, as we got closer and closer to the Swiss border – lots and lots of tunnels!!
The Lusso – whilst not a brand new example was absolutely superbly presented, an astounding interior, utterly cosseting in a “go on, let’s go for a 1000 mile drive just for fun!” sort of way.
There was power on tap in any gear and in any and every rev range. Oh yes, the tunnels!
Well, it’s a V12, and a Ferrari V12 at that – Of course, you have to. What a thing! What a sound, and what performance!! The lucky owner of this car is going to have a smile generator on demand!!
Over the Swiss border with no issues and it was the back road route to Kessel’s HQ taking us through hillside suburbia and a couple of larger towns.
Closing in on Lugano and through some twisting valleys before the scene changed completely and the stunning Lake Lugano revealed herself.
A couple of visiting American tourists asked for a photo as we looked for somewhere to capture the two beauties of the moment together (that’s – with maximum respect to the two simply lovely US ladies – the car and the lake!).
We spied out a couple of suitable locations before arriving at Kessel’s main Lugano Showroom with Ferrari and Maserati’s aplenty, the place that much (but not all) of the sales work is done.
For that we’d be taken to the company’s second home, just 5 minutes away, where all four of the arms of Kessel’s CARS offerings are readily on display to the lucky few invited behind closed doors.
CARS? Yes, that’s the descriptor you’ll see throughout Kessel’s corporate and consumer communication to describe a company that may very well be much, MUCH more than you realise.
To some Kessel is a Ferrari (or Maserati) dealer, to others, it’s a race team. In fact, it’s both of those and much more besides.
So why CARS?
C is for Kessel Classic – and is an expanding part of the business, with a significantly large new wing to their facility under construction that will principally see the Classic restoration and maintenance arms of the company growing rapidly.
For now the already capacious and absolutely immaculate workshop holds a number of stunning projects either completed or in various stages of progress.
Here, cars are treated to a full back to bare metal restoration, all to the same astonishing standard. The pride in the work here is obvious, with an engine and gearbox workshop, workbenches cleaner than a kitchen and bodywork being prepped to the standards of a classic sculptor.
A is for Kessel Auto – the umbrella term for the car sales business, Ferrari, Maserati and as we’ll cover a little later, Pagani!
Kessel has made quite a name for itself for the quality of pre-owned contemporary and classic cars it sells alongside a full range of the current ‘off the shelf’ and more bespoke offerings from all three Italian supercar makers!
The surroundings at both the Grancia showroom and the other major facility are predictably of very high quality with discreet spaces for those that require privacy and carefully curated ‘set dressing’ to remind all that enter the space of just how special a family it is that they are looking to enter!
You would expect that potential customers for Ferrari and Maserati would be treated well, pampered even – but the Grancia showroom had no mention at all of Kessel’s other ‘franchise’ – Pagani.
The customer base for the newer Italian supercar brand is very different, and the experience offered is more different still. So different that whilst we have seen it – and it is absolutely extraordinary – we have had to agree not to reveal any details whatsoever!
R is for Racing – and this is the arm of the Kessel empire that we at DSC are most familiar with.
The team’s race shop is the home nowadays to no fewer than six Ferrari 296 GT3s (1 x ELMS LMGT3 car, and GT3s for Michelin Le Mans Cup (x 2), GT World Challenge (x 2) plus a sixth (ex GT World Challenge) chassis and seven new Ferrari 296 Challenge cars from the European Series.
The team has a full range of support facilities for the cars on site with a full transition to the 296 now complete after the launch of the new 296 Challenge for the 2024 season in Europe.
One-make Ferrari racing has been a keystone of Kessel’s racing stable from its inception with a reminder of the heritage at one end of the workshop, a rare and immaculate 348 Challenge, the very first of a now nine model-long family bloodline.
Kessel’s in-house collection holds at least one of each of the major models in that history (348, 355, 360, 430, 458 and Evo, 488 and Evo) and it’s clear that the business model is a strong one with customers filtered into Ferrari Challenge via their track experience event and, where appropriate, on and into its GT racing efforts.
There’s little chance of seeing Kessel stepping into other areas of the sport at present though as you’ll read from Ronnie Kessel in our interview, he still has ambitions to race at both the Rolex 24 and Bathurst 12 Hours.
For now Kessel is looking to add further trophies to those they have earned, together with their customers, right up to the Le Mans 24 Hours (Kessel took a GTE Am class win as the service provider for US squad Scuderia Corsa in 2016).
S is for Service – and whilst that is a term that has a wider meaning across all arms of the company, in this instance it refers to the maintenance and repair of a range of very special road cars, including all of the marques sold by Kessel and more besides.
So far so normal service (no pun intended), but Kessel’s services and facilities go further – much further!
Whether with cars for road and/or track use the offer includes super secure storage, general maintenance, collection and delivery and on-event support.
It’s clearly a successful part of the business model, and from what we have seen the scope and scale of this part of the operation is simply extraordinary.
We have been asked to reveal very little of the what, and nothing of the where, but suffice it to say that our group, seeing this superb facility for the first time, all of us used to being in close proximity to very special competition cars, were instantly speechless when presented with the most undercover of Kessel’s services.
Personally I would go as far as saying that in purely road car terms it was, by a distance, the most extraordinary thing I have ever seen – and it wasn’t just road cars!
To achieve excellence is something to be prized. To achieve it to the degree and on the scale that we witnessed speaks volumes of the quality of the product, and the people behind it.
I’ll add just this: In 25 years of being around road and race cars of the highest quality, value and price what we saw across the Kessel facilities was on another level altogether!
There’s a lot more than you might think behind the Kessel name on the entry lists!
Find out more at Kessel
