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- A visit to the Historic Automobile Museum of La Sarthe is a sad reminder that sports car racing's glory days of several manufacturers battling each other for top Le Mans honors are unlikely to ever return. Yet, come to think of it, there's really no good reason why Audi should run against pretty much nobody in LMP1 in the American Le Mans Series while Peugeot just clinched the same class title in the Le Mans Series by beating pretty much nobody. (While I'm at it, let's be frank: arguably five of Audi's seven 24 Hours of Le Mans wins have also come against pretty much nobody). Couldn't we go back to the days of one global sports car championship with at least four or five manufacturers involved – a "Formula 1 light", if you will?
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- Since I'm daydreaming, the ACO should review its regulations completely. Currently, the LMP1 and LMP2 classes are redundant, but their biggest flaw is, as good as Audi's R10 and Peugeot's 908 look, they don't remotely translate to any "sports car" sold by those brands. Yes, the ACO intends to have close cockpits back by 2010, but the top Le Mans class should be made of cars closer to the GT1 machines, but lighter, more powerful and more visually appealing – currently, the Corvettes and Aston Martins in that class look too much like their roadgoing counterparts. Le Mans should be won annually by something resembling Porsche's 1998 GT1 or the "flying" Mercedes CLRs of 1999.

- Nothing sounds funnier on your radio than gangsta rap in French. I mean, I'm laughing again right now just remembering some of the lyrics.

- The first thing you'll notice when arriving at Maranello is that seemingly half of the city's population is comprised of Ferrari employees – something you'd expect from a company that employs nearly 3,000 people despite selling less than 6,000 cars per year. And yet Ferrari S.p.A. has no pension fund pressure issues – perhaps Mr. di Montezemolo has a few tips to share with the Big Three bosses?
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- Since 2004, the Scuderia has provided a serious tourist attraction in the form of the revamped Galleria Ferrari, its official museum. It may feel a little too commercial to a purist's taste, but the collection of scarlet road and race cars inside is amazing. Unfortunately, the adjacent Fiorano test track is not open to the public, though the bridge connecting the Maranello and Fiorano villages provides a cool view of the on-track action (and there's always some of that going on, even if it's just a rich guy testing his new Enzo).

- Though more than 100 miles away from Maranello, the Autodromo Nazionale di Monza is as much Ferrari's home as the Scuderia's base. Like the Nurburgring, Monza opens to public driving on specific days, but the most impressive feature of the circuit, located in the middle of a park that makes Central Park look like a backyard, may be the high-speed oval section of the track, deactivated since 1961. Standing on the oval's outside groove is impossible without holding on to the guard-rail – and if you were unlucky enough to crash through that barrier back then, the tree tops of the "Parco di Monza" awaited. Oddly, though, the oval's most famous victim was fictional: Ferrari driver Jean-Pierre Sarti, played by Yves Montand in John Frankenheimer's Grand Prix.