YOU KNOW SOMEONE pretty well after 12 hours in a waiting room together. The scene was Fiorano, Ferrari’s test track in Maranello, the characters were Vern Schuppan and myself and we were working a photoshoot of Vern’s car around a French Ferrari dealer’s track-day. It was the ex-Steve McQueen 275 GTB that Vern had converted back from a Straman NART Spyder and later sold amid a blaze of publicity at RM Sotheby’s in Monterey, 2014. After a brief burst of activity while the dealer’s clients enjoyed their lunch, Vern and I reckoned we’d probably got the job done. Not so photographer Julian Mackie, who predicted amazing evening light, light for which it would be worth waiting five hours doing nothing except chatting.
Julian was right. Shoot in the bag, the day was rounded off with
