COULD YOU EVER BUY A SECOND-HAND SUPERCAR?

“IT all starts with a coffee,” says Ferrari sales manager Glenn Butt as he escorts us towards a sumptuous seating area overlooking a showroom of dreams. We’re at Meridien Modena, one of the most well regarded Ferrari dealerships in the country, about to experience what very few do: the fabled process of buying a Ferrari.

- By Tom Jervis

Yet, as the espresso machine fires up and fills the air with coffee notes of cocoa, toasted nuts and wealth, we gaze across the exotic selection out on display and quickly notice how the values attributed to some of the secondhand models almost appear reasonable in today’s overpriced car market.

Nowadays, it’s very easy to spend close to six figures on a performance BMW or an electric Mercedes SUV. However, while the price tags of these vehicles are comparable to those of a preowned Ferrari, the customer experience couldn’t be more different.

Meridien Modena, for starters, is built upon a lovingly restored turn-of-the-20th-century power station in Lyndhurst, Hants, and is a destination in itself. Forget the cookie-cutter grey box in an industrial estate that most car dealerships find themselves in: if Arnold Clark bought the Versace Mansion and turned it into a luxury-car dealership, it wouldn’t be far off this.

Admittedly, when we first entered, the sight of a one-of-799 Ferrari F12tdf listed for £900,000 nearly had us make a U-turn straight for the gleaming glass doors we’d stepped through just moments prior; the cynic inside us can’t help but wonder whether its placement is designed to act as a deterrent for any chancers looking for a free joyride in a sleek supercar.

We stand and head to peruse the sensational stock displayed around us, but not before Glenn passes us our Ferrari-branded cup of freshly brewed coffee. We gingerly clutch it like a surgeon would a vital organ, acutely aware it’s almost certainly the most expensive piece of crockery we’ve ever laid hands on.

Given that this was our first plunge into the world of supercar ownership, Glenn tells us that “the California or Portofino are often used as stepping stones for Ferrari ownership”.