The facility will offer a chance of eight students to work at the Mille Chili Laboratory studying ways to reduce weight of automobiles. It is named after the Mille Chili design concept because that car's design premise was building an environmentally friendly sub-1,000kg (2,200lb) supercar. Helping the students learn and innovate new ways to make cars lighter will be a roomful of hardware, software and Ferrari-donated chassis.
Ferrari engineers will supplement the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia's teaching staff to help build the program. Ferrari CEO Amedeo Felisa said, “It is a great pleasure to inaugurate this laboratory, which will work on a very important issue for the future. The experience confirms that constant collaboration between private industry and University is a fundamental part, and contributes to growth for both parties: the University has to work with not exclusively theoretical issues, while the industry can confront itself with new ideas.”
In addition to the laboratory, Ferrari will als obe endowing six scholarships in engineering, physics, architecture, and human studies. The scholarships, unlike the laboratory, will be available at a number of Italian and global universities.
The Mille Chili concept, along with the FXX, is thought to preview the next generation of Ferrari supercars, such as the one spied in the gallery below.
