Yes, that Nick Mason. The man clearly can’t get enough noise in his life. After banging things with sticks for over four decades in epoch-defining kaleidoscopic rock outfit Pink Floyd, he became the lynchpin of “Ten tenths”, a business specializing in supplying the media with some of history’s most iconic and expensive cars.
As quoted on Ten Tenths’ website, the concept of the business is “akin to sending one’s children out to work”. And that pretty much sums it up. Nick Mason holds the keys to a huge array of exotic cars, and why not make them work for a living? This Ferrari 512 BB / LM is a case in point. Not one of the world’s most sought after machines, and with only a modest competition career to its name, this Prancing Horse receives only the right amount of mollycoddling.


Ten Tenths pretty much mirrors the ethos of the Goodwood Festival of Speed. It’s a money-making machine, but while Goodwood is all about entertaining a paying audience, Nick’s money comes from corporate clients. Both get exactly the same in return for their investment, though.
There aren’t many other places you can go to experience a fully-maintained, race-ready 1979 Ferrari. If you were making a movie that might require such a vehicle, Ten Tenths should be in your electronic rolodex. Or, if you want to experience the heady aroma of a hot flat-twelve in close quarters, come to Goodwood, and hover around the paddock.

If you stand beside the hillclimb course you get to see, hear, feel and taste these things as they’re hurled past the bales, flint walls and marshalls that line the track, and that’s all well and good. But if you stand in the paddock you can watch them breathing. Witnessing a car like this being started up and taken through its pre-flight checks is among the most visceral car-related experiences you can have, short of taking the wheel yourself.
This particular 512BB is a later mechanically fuel-injected machine, with 420bhp to its name. It made its race debut in ’79 with a promising overall 12th place finish in the Le Mans 24hr race. It competed again the next year, under a different owner, coming 23rd overall. Nick mason took the pink slips in 1990, and has owned it ever since, occasionally fielding it in classic racing events, sometimes sharing the wheel with Annete (Nettie), his wife. Surely this kind of relationship is something for the rest of us to aim for.

If you want to test the tolerance of your significant other right now, turn your speakers up for 16 seconds of hardcore thrash metal. It’s more Pantera than Pink Floyd (here’s a link if the embed doesn’t work).
(All images / video copyright Chris Haining / Hooniverse 2017)