How a boyhood Ferrari fan ended up with the best job in the world

Andrea Bertolini might just have the best job in the world. He gets to race Ferrari sportscars at international level and also drive its Formula 1 machinery of all vintages on a regular basis. No wonder a man who as a child used to be hoicked up onto his father’s shoulders to see what was going on over the walls of the Fiorano test track sometimes has to pinch himself.

Bertolini has worked for Ferrari man and boy: he joined the Italian marque as an apprentice aged 17 and has fulfilled a multitude of roles since: road car development driver; factory sportscar racer (and a successful one at that); a tester for the F1 team and its lead simulator man.

He also gets to shake down the chassis for Ferrari’s F1 Clienti programme that allows the most loyal – and wealthy – of the marque’s customers to own and drive a piece of F1 history. Which is why he is able to say that he has driven every Ferrari F1 car from the 1974 312B3 right up to the SF21 of three years ago.

Yet it wouldn’t be quite right to claim that Bertolini, now 50, is a Ferrari guy through and through. The biggest prizes he’s picked up in endurance racing have come not at the wheel of machinery bearing the Prancing Horse, rather the Tridente of then sister marque Maserati.

He will always be remembered for his role in the Maserati MC12 programme: he led development of the design and was its most successful driver, with 15 victories and four titles across the FIA GT Championship and GT1 World Championship. He still has an involvement with Maserati: he was loaned out to develop its GT2 racer – based on the MC20 sportscar – introduced for the 2023 season and the MCXtrema trackday version of the machine.

Bertolini’s is an amazing story. It’s much more than a tale of local lad made good. Not least because he didn’t start racing, cars that is, until he was 27. And when he did it was at the wheel of a Porsche, despite having been in the employ of Ferrari for nearly 10 years at that point.

Today the elder statesman of Ferrari's GT programme, Bertolini's rise from a humble apprentice is a remarkable one

Photo by: Ferrari

He was brought up just three miles from Fiorano in Sassuolo (and now lives the same distance in the opposite direction). Hence the trips to Fiorano as a child. “It seems like yesterday,” he remembers of his time peering over the wall at Fiorano to see the likes of Gilles Villeneuve and Michele Alboreto at the wheel of Ferrari F1 machinery. “I remember Gilles flying in aboard his helicopter to test, and then later Michele,” he adds.

He could never have imagined back then that one day any clandestine spectators at Fiorano would see his helmet poking out of the very same cars. Nor that he would go on to have such a long and illustrious career racing for the marque he loves.

Bertolini’s ambition as the kid craning to see over the walls of Fiorano wasn’t to race for Ferrari. He kind of ended up there by accident. He karted from the age of 10, but his aspirations never stretched beyond becoming a works driver in that discipline. That dream ended when, at the age of 16, his father told him the money had run out.

"I was really scared. I told him what I wanted to do, and he asked me if I was joking" Andrea Bertolini

“I cried every day for a week when my father said I couldn’t race anymore,” he recalls. “It was like a light had been turned off. I was at the point where I was getting free chassis and engines, but we didn’t have the money for the running costs. My dad ran a coffee shop.”

His karting connections, however, were pivotal in Bertolini’s shift from Ferrari apprentice – his first role was in the dyno department where he worked on, among other things, the 333 SP World Sports Car V12 – to Ferrari test driver. “There was a team I knew from karting which was going to move up to the Ferrari Challenge,” he explains. “They asked me to do a few laps at Fiorano in their new chassis.”

Present at the track that day was famed Ferrari road car tester Dario Benuzzi. “After five laps, Dario came to me and said, ‘I know you are with Ferrari already, but would you like to come to work for me in the experimental department and eventually become a test driver?’,” recalls a man universally known as ‘Berto’ in racing circles. “I had to ask him to say it again because I thought I was dreaming. Two days later the people from human resources told me I was moving to the experimental department.”

Bertolini, who didn’t have a licence for either track or road when he was approached by Benuzzi, went on to work on a number of projects. The first was developing power steering for the 512 TR, the first from beginning to end was the 360 Challenge Stradale. Bertolini was still working on road cars as he progressed through his twenties. A return to karting with a new chassis builder – Maranello Racing Kart – in 1998 set him on course of the job he has today.

A relatively late starter in cars, Bertolini impressed aboard Porsche machinery while on leave from his day job at Ferrari

Photo by: Sutton Images

Bertolini’s achievements on his competition comeback included runner-up position in the Italian 125cc Formula C gearbox series in Italy in 2000 and victory the year before in that category at the prestigious end-of-season tournament – the Torneo Industrie – at the Parma track. That same year, Lewis Hamilton took the crown in the ICA (Intercontinental A) division.

Those results led to an invite to race in FIA GT with the ART Engineering squad. But there was a problem. It wanted him to race its Porsche. An N-GT class 911 GT3-R to be exact.

“A friend recommended me to the team, which knew about what I did at Ferrari,” he recalls. “I asked for a meeting with my big boss, the technical director [Amedeo] Felisa, who went on to become Ferrari CEO. I was really scared. I told him what I wanted to do, and he asked me if I was joking. He agreed I could race, but told me, ‘When you are competing you have to take the time off as holiday.’

“After three or four months and a few races, he called me back into his office. I thought, I’m f***** here. He was really serious again and asked me how the racing was going. Then he told me that at the end of the year I would be coming back home to race.”

It was explained to Bertolini how Ferrari was establishing Competizioni GT, the motorsport department that has masterminded its GT programmes ever since, and now the double Le Mans 24 Hours-winning 499P Le Mans Hypercar project.

“He told me, you will be our development driver, a factory driver,” remembers Bertolini. “So don’t take any more drives with Porsche or other manufacturers!”

The new role for Bertolini resulted in a campaign in 2002 at the wheel of the first of a line of Ferrari GT racers that stretches to today’s 296 GT3. He raced in FIA GTs for the factory-backed JMB Racing squad at the wheel of the new 360 Modena with Andrea Garbagnati. The following year he fell just short of winning the N-GT class title while sharing with Fabrizio de Simone.

It was a momentous year in Bertolini’s history with Ferrari. At the start of the season he received a call from F1 team boss Jean Todt. He wasn’t expecting what he heard: “From today you are a Ferrari F1 test driver.” Bertolini subsequently learned Michael Schumacher had requested that he join Luca Badoer on the test team.

Bertolini began racing Ferraris in 2002 with JMB Racing in 360 Modenas

Photo by: Motorsport Images

“It was Michael who really pushed for me,” explains Bertolini. “People told me that he went to Todt and said, ‘Listen, we need this guy as part of the F1 family.’”

Over six years from 2003 to 2008, Bertolini would complete upwards of 10,000km per year of private testing, mostly at Fiorano, Monza and Mugello at the wheel of contemporary F1 machinery in the days of unlimited testing. It was only in 2008, when the first restrictions were placed on private running, that his involvement scaled back.

Bertolini was deeply embedded in the F1 team for those years and beyond: he was also its first simulator driver. Ferrari’s initial experimentation with simulation came at Fiat’s research centre in Turin (Centro Ricerche Fiat) in the days before Ferrari’s independence on the flotation of the company in 2016.

"I would do one week in the F1, normally four days, and then four days in the MC12. Then it was back to the F1" Andrea Bertolini

“Michael got sick driving it, and so did Luca,” says ‘Berto’. “And Rubens [Barrichello, Schmacher’s team-mate at the time] didn’t really like it either. When we started in 2003, it was really hard work. The graphics were not very good and by the end of a day in the sim I was destroyed. The level of graphics today is another world.”

Only at the end of 2009 did Ferrari open its first simulator at Maranello – and Bertolini was the first to drive that one, too. He continued as a member of the simulator team right up until 2019.

But there is a twist in Bertolini’s story at Ferrari just as he was getting going with the F1 team. Key members of the Competizioni GT department, former F1 engineer Giorgio Ascanelli included, moved over to Maserati. The result was the MC12 GT1 racer, a car that was successful and controversial in equal measure.

Bertolini was lead development driver on the project and part of the factory roster of drivers throughout its frontline career between 2004 and 2010. It was a busy time for him: “I would do one week in the F1, normally four days, and then four days in the MC12. Then it was back to the F1.”

Development expertise resulted in Bertolini being drafted into Ferrari's F1 test roster and being given a key role in its nascent simulator programme

Photo by: Sutton Images

It was with Maserati that Bertolini notched up his most prestigious achievements as a driver. Two FIA GT wins from four races when the car competed on a non-points, invitational basis with AF Corse at the back end of 2004 were followed by a title near-miss in its first full season with JMB, where Bertolini shared with Karl Wendlinger. Notwithstanding his subsequent accomplishments with the MC12, he has the strongest recollections of his first championship assault with the car in 2005.

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“I have the better memories of that year because it was the first full season with the car and I had done all the development,” he states. “We should have won the championship but we had a problem with the gearbox after only a few laps at the last race in Bahrain.

“I had been unlucky in 2003 with the 360. Fabrizio and I had a throttle problem at Anderstorp; we could have won the championship easily. After 2005 I started to think, ‘Andrea, you are fast and a good development driver, but are you one of these unlucky guys who never wins a championship?’”

Bertolini proved he wasn’t the following year. And proved it again and again over two stints with the Vitaphone Racing squad. He won four titles at the wheel of the MC12: three in FIA GTs (2006, 2008 and 2009), and one in the short-lived FIA GT1 World Championship (2010) that succeeded it. All four were notched up alongside Vitaphone team boss Michael Bartels, as were his two triumphs at the Spa 24 Hours double-points FIA GT round in 2006 and 2008.

He would win another title with Maserati, the 2011 International Superstars Series at the wheel of a Quattroporte, before moving back full-time to Ferrari. The successes in top-level sportscar racing didn’t stop. He has won titles in the Asian and European Le Mans Series, in 2013 and 2014 respectively, and took the World Endurance Championship GTE Am crown in 2015 and the class at Le Mans the same year.

His most recent championship triumph came in the GT World Challenge Europe Endurance Cup with victory in the Pro-Am Cup in 2022. And he’s still in the running for the Bronze Cup category this year as the series goes into its Jeddah finale in Saudi Arabia at the end of this month. All were notched up with AF Corse, the 2015 WEC and Le Mans wins under the banner of SMP Racing.

But the best part of the job over the years? It has to be, he says, getting the chance to drive the old F1 cars either from the museum or the F1 Clienti fleet.

“I have a photograph of every test and some videos, too,” he smiles proudly. “I collect everything.” That’s a lot of photos given that, as of today, Bertolini has completed 566 shakedowns.

Bertolini enjoyed huge success racing the MC12, which he was integral in developing - he missed out on the 2005 crown with JMB, but was unstoppable whenever paired with Bartels at Vitaphone

Photo by: Sutton Images

Bertolini has driven Ferraris from the 1950s and 1960s, and very soon he will complete a set of sorts by getting behind the wheel of every type from the past 50 years. Missing from his list is the 1982 126C2. A 126C3 is being converted back to 1982 ground-effect C2 spec and, on its imminent completion, Bertolini will put the first laps on the restored Harvey Postlethwaite-designed beauty.

He picks his very first run in an F1 Ferrari as his favourite moment from his 30-plus years with the marque. A shakedown for the nascent Clienti programme in 2001, it was a 1995 412T2, though the model type was irrelevant.

“It was an emotional moment for me, more than winning any championship or race,” sighs Bertolini. “I was thinking about how I used to be a kid looking over the fence, and here I am driving an F1 car at Fiorano.”

Bertolini still pinches himself when reflecting on his rise from a boyhood fan

Photo by: Emanuele Clivati | AG Photo