If you ever watched the Oscar-winning film "Ford v. Ferrari", you would probably know about the grueling conditions that drivers and their cars have to endure whilst racing in the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

Though Ford did win in the Matt Damon and Christian Bale movie and in the actual race back in 1966, Ferrari won the race more than 10 times, most recently, this year with an overall win over competitors Toyota, Porsche and Cadillac.

As a result, deep pocketed car collectors and racing enthusiasts who are looking to get closer to the action they only got to see on TV or movies now have a chance to live out the fantasies that they have only dreamed of.

Related: Stellantis brand Fiat is getting into an unusual new venture

The race winner (sort of)

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Ferrari  (RACE) - Get Free Report announced that it will offer its most dedicated customers a chance to get behind the wheel of a proper endurance race car. Dubbed the 499P Modificata, this $5.4 million racer is a non-competitive version based on the 499P race car that won the 2023 24 Hours of Le Mans.

What makes this Ferrari "Modificata," or modified in English, is the car's non-competitive nature. In the same vein as Porsche's limited edition 911 GT3 R rennsport, this version of the 499P does not have to comply with the strict rules it has to follow in order to race at Le Mans.

As per the rules, the Modificata has a hybrid system with a 3-liter twin-turbo V6 coupled with a front axle-mounted electric motor. WEC rules say that the electric motor can only be activated at speeds of over 190 km/h, but this car meant for mere mortals has four wheel drive activated at all times. When combined, the system makes 697 horsepower through all four wheels, and can be bumped up to 858 horse power for seven seconds at a time via a “push to pass” button on the steering wheel.

Apart from the power change, many of the car’s components are shared with the Le Mans-winning racer, including a full carbon fiber monocoque chassis, a seven-speed sequential gearbox, a brake-by-wire system and a 800 volt battery pack that can also be found in Charles LeClerc’s Formula 1 car.

Additionally, Ferrari also made some accommodations for those of us who don’t have the bodies, pain tolerances or skills of the most disciplined racing drivers, including a tweaked push-rod suspension, a digital rear-view mirror, a slightly wider racing seat and different tires meant to offer more “predictable handling.”

The catch

The 499P Modificata is the first car offered in the prancing horse’s new Sport Prototipi Clienti (Sport Prototype Client) program, where said cars will be kept and maintained in Ferrari’s facilities, and can be shipped to different racetracks around the world for their owners to drive.

Yes, a $5.4 million car you cannot keep in your garage.

On the bright side, you do get some value out of the $5.4 million price tag, as it covers the price of the cars, as well as two years of the Sport Prototipi Clienti program, which covers all the car’s maintenance, as well as the salary of your very own engineering team, who will accompany you at the track of your choice just like the ones at Le Mans.

Ferrari did not disclose how many 499P Modificatas will be made available.

Although this car is a version of one that won a 24-hour race on a circuit that partially consists of public roads, the Ferrari 499P Modificata is not street legal.

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Visitors to Japan are usually primed to look up – at the vast skyscrapers, the ornate temple gates, the traditional timber-framed guesthouses. Those who look down at their feet, though, might have noticed something equally intriguing on the ground. Ornate manhole covers in wrought iron, often plain, sometimes brightly painted, dot the country’s pavements, separating street life from the sewers that run below.

These objects have garnered a considerable following of “manholers” (as the hobbyists are known), who will be delighted to learn that city officials in Kyoto and other local authorities are now putting up retired covers for sale. For ¥5,500 (£31), fans can purchase their own 90kg piece of Japanese street furniture.

A construction ministry employee came up with the idea of decorative manhole covers in the late 1970s. It was an attempt to get the public on board not just with costly upgrades to the sewer system, but with the existence of the sewer system itself.

Beyond such efforts at corporate social responsibility, though, these urban ornaments connect to a long-standing historical urban planning concept, “machizukuri”. They speak to efforts revive local communities and wider regional economies.

A successful marketing ploy

Today more than 90% of municipalities have their own distinctive manhole cover designs. The motifs used are often rooted in local history, geography and culture.

They include the usual traditional cherry blossoms, landscapes, castles, bridges, birds and, as the Japan Ground Manhole Association website puts it, the wind and the Moon. Others reference sports teams, anime and local mascots.

Yokohama, in the summer of 2023, got four new Pikachu lids, when the city became the first in Japan to host the annual Pokemon world championship. These weren’t the first Pokemon-themed covers though. On the Pokelids website you can see similar designs mapped out across the country, from Hokkaido in the north to Kyushu in the south.

Manhole designs now adorn keychains, t-shirts and mugs, as well as a trading card game. An annual manhole summit has been organised since 2012. The tenth edition, held in Tokorozawa on December 1 2022, attracted an estimated 14,000 visitors.

This popularity is partially down to the successful publicity of the local agencies that manage the sewerage networks. Replacing worn-out covers is expensive. As the sewers are mainly run by local authorities, it is taxpayers’ money that gets spent on replacements – so getting the public on side is crucial. Capitalising on the covers’ popularity could also now be a good source of revenue for debt-laden public bodies.

Community building

Manhole covers sometimes provide tourist information at sightseeing spots and sports events or outline emergency escape routes in the event of an earthquake or tsunami. Some include QR codes and augmented reality.

This speaks to the urban design trend of machizukuri, a term which combines machi (best translated as “community” or “shared space”, a place both physical and intangible in which community comes together and social activities take place) with zukuri (which means “producing” and “nurturing”). The idea connects urban planning with community building.

By the late 1960s, the environmental damage caused by Japan’s rapid economic growth after 1945 was becoming impossible to ignore. The period was also a time of tumultuous student and anti-war protest.

Machizukuri emerged as an idealistic philosophy that aimed to improve the everyday environment through a bottom-up transformation, involving citizens, experts and local officials. The idea was to enliven urban areas by energising residents and reveal the spirit of the locality.

The term was more widely used in the mid-1970s and through the 1980s, as national economic policy brought increasing free trade in agriculture, relocated large factories overseas and privatised state-owned businesses. These neo-liberal reforms were a major cause of the now well-known problems of rural depopulation and ageing in Japan.

Ultimately, the responsibility for rural revitalisation shifted on to municipalities. Local authorities were tasked with finding creative ways to sustain and revive local economies. The idealistic philosophical notion of machizukuri of the late-1960s was coopted by the changing economic imperatives of central government.

In the 1990s, tourism – domestic and inbound foreign – became a primary tool for machizukuri. Local authorities in declining rural areas tapped into a national sense of nostalgia in their campaigns to attract domestic visitors. Small towns and villages became the repository of what the popular mass media came to describe as the “real Japan”, the one left behind and forgotten in the rapid transformation of the postwar years.

The bubble economy of the early 1990s saw amusement parks, golf clubs, holiday resorts and out-of-town shopping centres populate the landscape and create jobs. Transportation to major cities was vastly improved through high-speed rail and highway networks. Local specialities – food, farming products, arts and crafts – were commodified and marketed. As elsewhere, the connection between localism and economic ideologies, such as post-developmentalism and neoliberalism, has become central to the growth of consumer society in Japan.

Fans who decide to invest in a manhole cover are not just buying a pretty, heavy piece of artwork but something with cultural significance, that speaks to a feeling of shared belonging and communal life. The fact that they are even for sale also highlights how fragile – how under threat – this feeling is. Local communities, after all, have been destroyed by the neoliberal economy of the last four decades.

Machizukuri effectively creates a marketplace for nostalgia. These decorative manhole covers are simply one more element in the commodification of the spaces and places in which everyday life takes place. A pragmatic approach to sewerage management has become another opportunity to go shopping.

Martyn Smith does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Read More

Visitors to Japan are usually primed to look up – at the vast skyscrapers, the ornate temple gates, the traditional timber-framed guesthouses. Those who look down at their feet, though, might have noticed something equally intriguing on the ground. Ornate manhole covers in wrought iron, often plain, sometimes brightly painted, dot the country’s pavements, separating street life from the sewers that run below.

These objects have garnered a considerable following of “manholers” (as the hobbyists are known), who will be delighted to learn that city officials in Kyoto and other local authorities are now putting up retired covers for sale. For ¥5,500 (£31), fans can purchase their own 90kg piece of Japanese street furniture.

A construction ministry employee came up with the idea of decorative manhole covers in the late 1970s. It was an attempt to get the public on board not just with costly upgrades to the sewer system, but with the existence of the sewer system itself.

Beyond such efforts at corporate social responsibility, though, these urban ornaments connect to a long-standing historical urban planning concept, “machizukuri”. They speak to efforts revive local communities and wider regional economies.

A successful marketing ploy

Today more than 90% of municipalities have their own distinctive manhole cover designs. The motifs used are often rooted in local history, geography and culture.

They include the usual traditional cherry blossoms, landscapes, castles, bridges, birds and, as the Japan Ground Manhole Association website puts it, the wind and the Moon. Others reference sports teams, anime and local mascots.

Yokohama, in the summer of 2023, got four new Pikachu lids, when the city became the first in Japan to host the annual Pokemon world championship. These weren’t the first Pokemon-themed covers though. On the Pokelids website you can see similar designs mapped out across the country, from Hokkaido in the north to Kyushu in the south.

Manhole designs now adorn keychains, t-shirts and mugs, as well as a trading card game. An annual manhole summit has been organised since 2012. The tenth edition, held in Tokorozawa on December 1 2022, attracted an estimated 14,000 visitors.

This popularity is partially down to the successful publicity of the local agencies that manage the sewerage networks. Replacing worn-out covers is expensive. As the sewers are mainly run by local authorities, it is taxpayers’ money that gets spent on replacements – so getting the public on side is crucial. Capitalising on the covers’ popularity could also now be a good source of revenue for debt-laden public bodies.

Community building

Manhole covers sometimes provide tourist information at sightseeing spots and sports events or outline emergency escape routes in the event of an earthquake or tsunami. Some include QR codes and augmented reality.

This speaks to the urban design trend of machizukuri, a term which combines machi (best translated as “community” or “shared space”, a place both physical and intangible in which community comes together and social activities take place) with zukuri (which means “producing” and “nurturing”). The idea connects urban planning with community building.

By the late 1960s, the environmental damage caused by Japan’s rapid economic growth after 1945 was becoming impossible to ignore. The period was also a time of tumultuous student and anti-war protest.

Machizukuri emerged as an idealistic philosophy that aimed to improve the everyday environment through a bottom-up transformation, involving citizens, experts and local officials. The idea was to enliven urban areas by energising residents and reveal the spirit of the locality.

The term was more widely used in the mid-1970s and through the 1980s, as national economic policy brought increasing free trade in agriculture, relocated large factories overseas and privatised state-owned businesses. These neo-liberal reforms were a major cause of the now well-known problems of rural depopulation and ageing in Japan.

Ultimately, the responsibility for rural revitalisation shifted on to municipalities. Local authorities were tasked with finding creative ways to sustain and revive local economies. The idealistic philosophical notion of machizukuri of the late-1960s was coopted by the changing economic imperatives of central government.

In the 1990s, tourism – domestic and inbound foreign – became a primary tool for machizukuri. Local authorities in declining rural areas tapped into a national sense of nostalgia in their campaigns to attract domestic visitors. Small towns and villages became the repository of what the popular mass media came to describe as the “real Japan”, the one left behind and forgotten in the rapid transformation of the postwar years.

The bubble economy of the early 1990s saw amusement parks, golf clubs, holiday resorts and out-of-town shopping centres populate the landscape and create jobs. Transportation to major cities was vastly improved through high-speed rail and highway networks. Local specialities – food, farming products, arts and crafts – were commodified and marketed. As elsewhere, the connection between localism and economic ideologies, such as post-developmentalism and neoliberalism, has become central to the growth of consumer society in Japan.

Fans who decide to invest in a manhole cover are not just buying a pretty, heavy piece of artwork but something with cultural significance, that speaks to a feeling of shared belonging and communal life. The fact that they are even for sale also highlights how fragile – how under threat – this feeling is. Local communities, after all, have been destroyed by the neoliberal economy of the last four decades.

Machizukuri effectively creates a marketplace for nostalgia. These decorative manhole covers are simply one more element in the commodification of the spaces and places in which everyday life takes place. A pragmatic approach to sewerage management has become another opportunity to go shopping.

Martyn Smith does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Read More