Eric Schorvitz: The Ferrari 599 That Made a Best Friend, and the Specials He Designs Now

Eric Schorvitz has owned a manual Ferrari 355, a 599 he still regrets selling, an SF90, and three 296s. He’s also a software entrepreneur who spent years paying himself minimum wage to keep his company alive, and he was an early Tesla Model S owner in Atlanta. Throttlecast host Grant Brewer has known him for more than a decade, since Grant’s days at Motorcars of Atlanta.

For this episode Grant was joined by Josh, one of the founders of The Ride Lounge. They covered buying Ferraris, the Tailor Made cars Eric is designing, and keeping a small company alive.

The Tesla that beat a McLaren

Around 2014, Eric was at Motorcars looking at a dark red McLaren 650S, one of the first in Atlanta. He said he’d think about it, went home, and ordered a Tesla Model S online without seeing one.

A baseball dad in East Cobb had told him to buy Tesla stock. Had he put the Model S money there instead, he jokes, he would have all the cars.

How Eric Schorvitz bought his Ferrari 599 from Italy

His first Ferrari was a 1995 355 with a manual gearbox, which he tracked. He had loved the brand since Magnum, P.I.

In 2014 he flew to Italy to tour the Ferrari, Lamborghini, and Maserati factories. Ferrari’s, he says, was a religious experience.

Back at the hotel, he found a 599 on the Motorcars website and called Ed Bolian from Italy. Ed told him he was in Italy and should go have fun. Eric wanted the car.

It was a 2011, one of the last 599s built before GTO production started. It had stickered at about $400,000, and it was offered at $200,000. The paint was a deep red metallic with a flat gray roof and matching gray wheels, over black leather with red stitching. What it lacked was the HGTE package. Ferrari of Atlanta tracked down the exhaust and suspension, the last set at the factory. The technician took the suspension off three times to get it right to the millimeter. Eric added carbon shields and a GTO-style mesh grille and raced the car at Road Atlanta. In total he had about $225,000 in it.

The car helped his business too. Conventional wisdom says a small business owner shouldn’t drive something flashy. Eric found the opposite. His clients figured a man driving that car wasn’t going to go broke or disappear.

The first owner who became his executive chairman

In those days the warranty book listed the first owner. Eric’s said Atlanta, and the name was a common one. He went through about a thousand Facebook profiles until one fit, then sent a text: had he ever owned a purple Ferrari? The reply: “That’s mine.”

The first owner had owned 30 Ferraris and ordered the car to look like a GTO. When they spoke, he told Eric he didn’t want to know him. Eric asked when they could have lunch. They’ve been best friends ever since, and he is now the executive chairman of Eric’s company. “If it weren’t for the Ferrari, I never would have known him,” Eric says.

Eric later traded the 599 for a McLaren 570S. He regretted the trade quickly, because his heart is with Ferrari.

V12 or V8

Eric has owned both, and he describes the difference in one line. “In the V12 cars, you feel like a movie star.” The V8 and V6 cars make you feel like a race car driver, because their lineage is racing. Forced to pick one, he’d take the racing feel.

Why he calls the 296 Ferrari’s best car

He has owned three 296s and has ridden in a 296 Challenge car. People who say the move to a hybrid V6 was a mistake, he says, have never driven one. He has also owned an SF90, with 1,000 horsepower and two electric motors up front for torque vectoring. His point is that a hybrid removes turbo lag and shift lag. The 296 has one motor, drives like a go-kart, and to his eye is a 250 LM throwback.

Designing a Ferrari Tailor Made homage

His next car is a 296 Speciale, designed through Ferrari’s Tailor Made program in New York as a tribute to a one-off 1965 250 LM special: white, with blue stripes and a red interior. He worked on it with Aldo, a Tailor Made specialist. Eric gives him veto power. All-chrome wheels were a no.

The hard part was the stripes. Eric measured photos pixel by pixel to get the widths. Finally he emailed a leading author on the 250s, who replied with 15 photos and one note: don’t use metallic paint for the stripe, because it wasn’t metallic back then. Two of those photos were enough to get the exact dimensions.

He is also building a 12Cilindri Spider through Ferrari’s Atelier program. He was one of three Atlanta customers picked to do an Atelier car. He and his wife designed it as a homage to a 1971 Daytona signed by Piero Ferrari: silver, with a red and black interior and Daytona-style stripes on the seats.

Building a company on beans from a can

Eric has been an entrepreneur for most of his 30-year career. He worked a few years at Barclays Global Investors in San Francisco and at CheckFree. He came to Georgia when a Suwanee company acquired one of his San Francisco businesses. He has since grown a two-person software company into one with more than 20 employees and about a hundred investors.

Some recent years were lean. He paid himself minimum wage, about $35,000 to $36,000 a year, because paying himself less would have cost him health benefits through the company. His wife’s answer was that they both work, they have savings, and they’d figure it out.

His lesson is about people. “Your employees and the relationships you build will either be your biggest liability or your biggest asset.” His father’s rule: be careful whose toes you step on climbing the ladder, because you’ll meet them again on the way down.

Getting a spouse on board

His wife is a teacher of the visually impaired and was never a car person. Ferrari of Atlanta invited her to Corso Pilota, Ferrari’s driving school. She didn’t want to go fast or ride in the Challenge car. An instructor won her trust and took her on a hot lap. She got out and called it the greatest thing she’d ever done. Now she goes to Ferrari Club of America events with him, and the Purosangue is her favorite car.

His advice: focus a spouse on one brand, not cars in general, and take as much interest in their passions as you want them to take in yours.

Milan and the 849 Testarossa

Ferrari of Atlanta brought a few couples to Milan for the 849 Testarossa unveiling. Eric guessed the name before the reveal. He introduced himself to Piero Ferrari, and to Frédéric Vasseur, the one man in the room in an F1 shirt instead of a suit. A few days later in Bologna, Vasseur turned up at the same restaurant, and Eric bought his dinner.

Rapid fire

• Dream three-car garage: a 288 GTO, a 296 as the daily, and a 12Cilindri Spider as the touring V12.
• His prediction, made on Throttlecast first: the 296 will finish its run with a Challenge Stradale that drops the hybrid system, makes around 600 horsepower, and offers a manual.
• Best road he’s ever driven: Road Atlanta. He drives it at least eight times a year.

His closing advice came from graduate school, when he made $19,000 a year and paid $300 a month in rent. He was content then. You don’t need money for that, he says. Find what you love and spend time with the people you love.

Watch the full episode

The full conversation with Eric Schorvitz is above and on YouTube, including the story of the Michael Jordan Testarossa he licked as a kid.

Eric’s favorite thing about Ferrari is the community. At a club dinner, you never know if the person next to you owns one car or a collection. That’s the room Throttlecast is recorded in at The Ride Lounge, a private car club in Peachtree Corners and Midtown Atlanta, and the lounge floor is available for club dinners and private events. Plan an event at The Ride Lounge.