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If you’re any sort of fan of Ferrari, you owe it to yourself to visit Maranello, Italy. The entire city (population: 17,500) feels like a shrine to the storied supercar marque, and nowhere else on Earth have I by sheer happenstance found myself lunching adjacent to Charles Leclerc and his entourage; had my tour of a Formula One scuderia curtailed because Lewis Hamilton was in the building; or been tempted thrice in three different gift shops hawking the same official Prancing-Horse-branded merchandise. (Regarding that last, well: in the end, I resisted forking over CDN$7,350 for the carbon-fibre Ferrari poker set.)

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What’s more, Maranello is but a 20-minute drive from Modena, birthplace of Enzo Ferrari and home to the Enzo Ferrari Museum.

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If you can’t make it out to Maranello, logging into Ubisoft’s The Crew Motorfest racing video game this July (on Playstation, Xbox, or PC) might just be the next best thing. This month, the company kicks off a partnership with Ferrari to premiere four weeks of brand-affiliated online events; launch a new Ferrari-supercar-centered “Playlist” of races; and perhaps most excitingly, to host the digital debut of the just-released Ferrari F80.

Yes, this’ll be gamers’ first chance to get behind the wheel of the marque’s new 1,184-horsepower flagship supercar, but honestly this author was more elated to pick up the controller and find out Ubisoft’s recreated that aforementioned Enzo Ferrari Museum in The Crew Motorfest, too. Players can pilot a half-dozen vehicles from the collection in-game, and literally drive up to a facsimile of the museo and admire the iconic models parked on plinths outside. Jump into the supercar Playlist, and you’re greeted by a clip of Ferrari museums director Michele Pignatti Morano, who just before each event fills you in on the history of the car you’re about to race.

Here’s how the Ubisoft developers at The Crew Motorfest brought a bit of Maranello to the consoles and computers of gamers around the world.

Joining The Crew

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The Crew Motorfest, launched in 2023, is an open-world-style adaptation of Ubisoft’s The Crew 2 racing game; whereas the latter sicced you on specific missions across a miniaturized map of the United States, Motorfest lets you explore a shrunken-down-but-still-unbelievably-vast reproduction of the Hawai’ian islands of Oahu and Maui.

The “Crew” part of the name refers to online multiplayer events you pull off as part of a team or ‘crew’; the “Motor-” bit makes room for the dozen-odd stunt planes and speedboats you’re able to pilot in-game, alongside some 700 cars; and the “-fest” suffix nods to the game’s music-festival-themed backdrop. (It’s no coincidence The Crew’s chief rival, Microsoft’s veteran Forza: Horizon franchise, is also set within a festival atmosphere.)

Outside of the “Summit Contest,” “Grand Race,” and “Demolition Royale” online modes, the heart of Motorfest’s gameplay lies in more than two dozen “Playlists,” curated series of events and activities centred on a particular car subculture, style, or era. (My favourite so far has to have been the “Lowrider vs. Donk” Playlist, which included a contest to make my hydraulics-equipped Buick Regal hop to a rap beat, Dance Dance Revolution-style.)

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Ubisoft’s Ivory Tower studio, headquartered in Lyon, France, puts some 220 developers to work keeping the experience fresh, with new weekly online challenges, as well as new Playlists that come out every few months, in game updates called “Seasons”; the new Ferrari-focused content is part of Motorfest’s Season 7 update, launched July 2. While The Crew Motorfest already had about 20 various Ferraris on its playable roster, it was until now missing a few of the “Big Five” supercars adored by collectors, like the F50 and 288 GTO.

Telling supercar stories

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Sorry, that should read just “GTO.” Ferrari museums director Michele Pignatti Morano makes the punto in one of the game’s cutscenes that “288” is not part of the car’s official name. “That’s the precise thing we [the museum] need to show, to teach people the history of the brand,” Morano tells me during a post-gameplay interview. Ubisoft’s flown me out to Maranello and Modena to experience both Season 7 of The Crew Motorfest and the Enzo Ferrari Museum firsthand, as well as to meet with Morano. Suffice it to say, the director is more than happy to put the historical institution in front of the eyes of such a large, relatively youthful audience.

“Everybody sees a museum as a place where there are cars, there are old things, and we are not that kind of museum, Ferrari is not that kind of brand,” he says. “And so you have a younger generation that [spends a lot of time] in the front of a screen, that plays games. What better way to connect with these people?” I can sense Morano might be happier were the game’s digital rendition of the museum set in Modena instead of Maui, but he’s certainly not complaining, and says he feels honoured Ubisoft decided to include him in the video clips serving up “small stories” about each car, about the marque, and Enzo.

“I have been working for Ferrari [over 20 years] and I’ve done different things, but to represent the museums in this way is very nice,” he smiles. It doesn’t hurt either that Morano is the father of three avid gamers himself, whom he expects might be a little gobsmacked to see their dad in their favourite racing game.

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Ask Julien Hummer, Ubisoft Ivory Tower Creative Director, though, and it’s the developers who feel honoured to be able to feature Ferrari and Morano in The Crew Motorfest. “In fact, the whole purpose of The Crew Motorfest is to tell stories about car culture—it was very important since the beginning to have these kind of stories, anecdotes, the stories behind a car, behind a brand,” he says.

The wealth of stories is what initially drew Hummer and Ubisoft to consider the Ferrari-focused Playlist, but a little fortuitous timing didn’t hurt either, in terms of the Enzo Ferrari Museum having just launched a supercars-focused exhibit meant to highlight the F80 flagship revealed October 2024. “We wanted to tell stories about Ferrari, and then when we met, it [evolved into] something better,” says Hummer. “We knew we were going to tell the story of supercars,” he says, but when Ferrari agreed to let The Crew Motorfest host the F80’s video-game debut, “finishing the story with a new one became something very important for us.”

Bringing passion into the game

Video-game deep-dives into car culture are nothing new, but the depth of detail Ubisoft has sunk into recreating the Enzo Ferrari Museum digitally is still somewhat incredible to see. “We are trying to have the music, we are trying to have people, trying to tell stories, the gameplay, the visuals, the art elements,” says Hummer. The Ferrari Playlist even goes as far as to incorporate quotes from Enzo himself—lifted from the walls of the museum—into loading screens between races.

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“When I came back to the studio [after visiting the museum] I had to share with the team that they had to integrate this passion, this history, this feeling I got visiting the museum, to try to give that to players,” relays Hummer.

The Enzo Ferrari Museum in Modena—along with a sister site in Maranello focused more on the brand’s racing pedigree—is visited by over 860,000 people each year. The partnership with Ubisoft opens the museum’s doors to The Crew franchise’s community of 40 million, gamers Morano sees as future Ferrari fans, as tifosi. “We want to come into this game to get nearer to a community that maybe just knows the cars, but not the history,” he says. “And for us, that was a very important tool, to actually bring a pillola, a touch of history, to the young generation—even just a small thing, we don’t need that they get the whole history, but just a small hint of saying, ah, I did not know that.”

Should you end up finding yourself hooked on Season 7 of The Crew Motorfest, on driving a virtual F80 supercar and becoming a Ferrari tifosi like Morano hopes, he’s got one piece of advice, one we’d presume Ubisoft left on the cutting-room floor when splicing his Prancing Horse trivia into the Playlist: “Video games are important, but the real cars are nicer—so come to Maranello.”

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