The cars that race, roar, and crash so memorably in Michael Mann’s Ferrari are not just gorgeous—they are also, more than 60 years after the movie is set, extremely rare, and valuable, with some selling in the eight-figure range for those devoted enough to pay.

A guide to Hollywood’s biggest races

That meant it was an in-depth process to find cars that could look and sound like these exemplars of automotive art and engineering. And it was made no less challenging by the famed automotive, and detail, obsession of its director. “Michael is a massive car lover. He knows absolutely everything about cars,” says Danny Triphook, the picture supervisor on Ferrari, responsible for sourcing the movie’s automobiles. “In some other films, I would have had the ability to say, ‘Oh, let’s do this or let’s do that because this car is better because of this.’ There was no chance I could do that because Michael knows everything.”

Triphook’s first assignment was to conduct a “massive, massive, massive research investigation,” sorting through old Italian television, documentaries, and film footage to get a sense of which cars could have been on the road, and tracks, in 1957, when the film is set. He then sat down with Mann and went through the script, “agreeing on what vehicles we needed for each character, what vehicles we needed in each location.” Then, he started looking for cars.

Triphook had the cooperation of additional experts. These included Gabriele Lalli, the operations manager at Ferrari Classiche, the brand’s in-house archive and restoration facility, who helped ascertain what factory vehicles may have been raced during the season depicted in the film. He also had assistance from major collectors, who agreed to loan him their vehicles.

Triphook soon discovered that this is a tight, gossipy, and competitive community. “One collector would speak to another one and say, ‘Oh, yeah. My car is going to be in the movie.’ So the other collector wanted to be in the movie as well, to the point where these guys were ringing me instead of me reaching out for it,” he says.

He ultimately sourced 393 vehicles for the movie, a hoard that required its own similarly sized transportation infrastructure. “We couldn’t drive these on the road to take them to set because of the insurance,” he says. “So we had to use 333 car carriers.”

Back in 1957, racing was very much a contact sport. Many race cars did not survive, and often those that did are now too valuable for Mann to rub together on the track. So he and his team engaged Rita Campana of Carrozzeria Campana, a 76-year-old, family-owned automotive fabrication and restoration shop in Modena, near where Ferrari and Maserati are headquartered. They were asked to build nine replicas for the film: three Ferrari 355 Ss, two Ferrari 315 Ss, two Ferrari 801 F1s, and two Maserati 450S.

To create templates for these reproductions, “we started with scanning the original ones,” says owner Rita Campana, the granddaughter of the shop’s founder. Campana and her team used sophisticated photographic technologies to take detailed digital portraits. But, for the builds, they used the same analog techniques that Enzo Ferrari’s own artisans used back in the day: hand hammering, welding, sanding, and painting the bodies.

Though they bodied some of these ersatz Italians in fiberglass, the ones that would star in the film’s stellar collision sequences were built in metal. “Because when Michael needed a car crashed, he wanted to see the proper crash,” Campana explains. “If you crash a fiberglass car, you just see the fiberglass crack. It doesn’t crash like you see with an aluminum car.”

The biggest challenge for this team was timing. “Normally when [we] work on vintage cars, for a complete restoration, it can take, say, one year, two years, sometimes three years to complete,” Campana says. Her team had to “build nine cars in three months and a half.”

For the sake of durability, these cars were constructed on new, lightweight, race-proven chassis from kit car manufacturer Caterham, with modern engines that could run all day without incident. But these contemporary, turbocharged motors lacked the mellifluous output of 12-cylinder racing engines from the 1950s. So another team had to seek out proper, period-correct vehicles to act as voiceover surrogates.

Mann wanted to capture the sound of these cars at speed: accelerating, shifting, braking, turning. This required driving the cars in some simulacrum of the racing experience, on a closed course, while covered in microphones. “We had a couple in the engine bay, we had a couple up in the cockpit, and we had two sets of two on the tailpipes because that’s where the magic happens,” says Tony Lamberti, the Academy Award–winning sound editor who worked on Ferrari.

In addition to his myriad field recordings, Lamberti and his team found clever effects to layer into the mix, especially for the very analog sounds of the old cars’ switchgear. “I use these guys in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, and they have a lot of old metal, old machinery around,” Lamberti says. “So, like, the latch of an old aircraft door is used for the gear shift because I knew that it had a more vintage sound.”

It all syncs up, and looks, sounds, and feels profoundly immersive, like you’re actually on the road in 1957. Nowhere is this truer than during the racing scenes, which result, very realistically, in some extraordinarily harrowing and destructive crashes. We ask Rita Campana, who had built those nine perfect replicas at light speed, if it was sad to see her babies destroyed on set.

“Yes, thanks for asking!” she says. “Nobody asked this. It was very sad. A lot of hours of work, metalwork, painting, and just to see these cars flying.”