For many people, driving an exotic sports car is a lifelong dream. For Lenn Kench, it's a job.

OVER the past 30 years Lenn Kench has driven more than 1000 Ferraris - more than anyone else in Australia. So why does he tell people he's a Volvo mechanic? "Any time I tell someone what I do, it leads into the same questions," he says. "The most common is: 'Have you driven one?' That always puzzles me. Then they ask if I own one, what's the fastest I've ever driven and have I ever crashed one? I tell them I don't own one but I get to drive everyone else's."

For the record, the fastest Kench has driven is 264 km/h - on a race track, in a Porsche. And the crashes? More about that later.

The Volvo line is not entirely a lie. At 16, Kench spent the first year of his apprenticeship as a Volvo mechanic - before moving onto Ferraris and Porsches full-time - and his first company car was a Volvo 240. But he has been working on Ferraris since he was 15, when he did two weeks' work experience at the Volvo-Porsche-Ferrari dealership in Lindfield, NSW, that eventually gave him his first job.

Kench was so young when he first drove a Ferrari - a 308 GTB - he had to put P-plates on it. He was 17 and in the second year of his apprenticeship.

"That's about the only way someone on $59 a week could drive a Ferrari," he laughs. "The workshop manager said I'd done a good job on the car and I could take it for a shakedown run, which meant driving it for about 10 km and checking to make sure everything was OK."

Was he tempted to explore the car's potential? "No, I was shitting myself. I knew people who'd tried to have a bit of fun and ended up having serious accidents. One hurt himself and the other lost his job, so I took it real easy."

It was a prudent move. Kench went on to work on and drive between 10 and 15 Ferraris a week for 20 years and travel the world. He has been to Italy 31 times but even after all his trips to the factory and countless phone calls to counterparts at Ferrari, Kench's Italian is still a bit rusty.

"I can understand about 80 per cent of what someone's saying to me but I can't have a conversation. I know a few of the basics and how to order a pizza and a beer."

On his first trip to Italy in November 1982 he met company founder Enzo Ferrari. Kench and a group of young English, American and Australian mechanics sent to Italy for technical training were having lunch in the restaurant across the road from the Ferrari factory in Maranello, where Enzo Ferrari was dining with some of his managers.

"He sent one of his minders to his office to get some Ferrari tie pins. The minder came over to us and gave us a pin each and said, 'This is from Mr Ferrari.' That was a pretty special moment. I still wear the pin today." That was the first and last time Kench saw the "Commendatore". Enzo died in 1988.

Kench has since swapped his overalls for a Hugo Boss suit, which goes well with the pin; he's now the chief Ferrari technician in Australia, working for the official importer.

These days Kench is lucky if he drives a Ferrari once a month. (His daily transport is an Alfa Romeo 159 but before working for the importer, he had Holden Commodores and a series of Jeeps as company cars.)

He usually lets the customer or the service manager do the driving so he can diagnose any potential faults, although this level of personal service (every new Ferrari buyer gets Kench's mobile number) can have its drawbacks. Particularly if customers are trying to impress Kench with their driving skills.

"It can be a problem, for sure. I had a recent experience interstate where a customer was trying to replicate a problem with the car. He was driving very erratically. It got to the point where I had to ask him to slow down or the road test was going to stop."

There are some white-knuckle rides Kench has fond memories of, though. His best experience in a Ferrari was in the passenger seat of the F40 supercar in 1989, with Ferrari test driver Dario Benuzzi at the wheel. They were on Ferrari's Fiorano test track and Benuzzi was demonstrating the car's capabilities.

The following may not have been in the textbook but it got the desired reaction. "We were going down the straight, doing 120 km/h, he tapped his head, hit the brakes and spun it into a full 360-degree loop and then kept driving. That was probably the best Ferrari experience I've had."

His most embarrassing Ferrari experience was about 10 years ago. "I was picking up the very first 355 F1 from Sydney Airport. It had been flown over from Italy. I hadn't even seen the new gearbox system and we hadn't done the training yet. I figured out how to get it into first gear but when I got to the first set of lights, it discreetly switched back to neutral, as it was supposed to. But when the lights went green I didn't realise what had happened and I was sitting there struggling to get it to move again. People were beeping their horns at me. It was pretty embarrassing."

Any brushes with fame? "We can't talk about any of our high-profile customers but I've met (former Ferrari formula one driver) Michael Schumacher several times at the Australian Grand Prix," he says. Each year it was Kench's job to usher the seven-times world champion from the Ferrari pits to the hospitality area where the race driver met about 200 race-mad Ferrari owners. "In all that time I only ever exchanged a few words with him," he says. "He recognised me as the guy to get him from point A to point B but that was about it."

Kench has driven almost every model of Ferrari - including the priceless supercars. His most nerve-racking experience, though, was barely at walking pace, reversing the $2 million Enzo supercar onto the Ferrari stand at the Sydney motor show in 2002 while avoiding cranes, construction workers and a neighbouring $600,000 Lamborghini.

"I was seriously nervous because I knew the Enzo was important. We already had the orders - the car was already sold out - but it was a big drawcard for the show. We had to drive it up on skinny timber ramps and I didn't want to catch a wheel or put a mark on it."

So, has Kench scratched, dented or - dare we ask it - crashed a Ferrari? Most people who work with expensive cars don't want to tempt fate by answering that question but with some gentle persuasion Kench comes clean.

"The only lose I've had in a Ferrari on the road was in the late 1980s. To be honest it was caused by a mistake made by another technician. We changed the clutch on a car and he forgot to oil up the gears and . . . on the test drive, about a kilometre from work, driving down a hill, the rear wheels suddenly locked up.

"I ended up spinning backwards up someone's driveway. It looked like skill but it was a pure fluke. I was very lucky there was no traffic." Other than that incident, Kench says he has never put a scratch on a Ferrari.

Some of his former colleagues haven't been so lucky. One car was wrecked about five years ago after being taken for a test drive. Fortunately, it wasn't a customer's car but a trade-in. The young mechanic who was driving wasn't so lucky. He lost his job.

Kench is reluctant to divulge any more details. "Look, in any trade, in any business, accidents happen. A lot of them are caused by the conditions or people pulling out of driveways but you need to drive with an acute awareness of what's around you. The other problem is that a lot of the drivers around you are staring at the car and not watching the road and they can veer into you."

These days the mechanics who test-drive Ferraris must be 25 years old for insurance reasons and supervised by the workshop manager. "In my era we just stuck P-plates on them," Kench says.