Michael Mann still has another gear. At 80, he's driving 'Ferrari'

Even at age 80, Michael Mann has lost little of his velocity

NEW YORK -- Michael Mann, who gave Crockett a white Ferrari on “Miami Vice,” pummeled cars with bullets in the shootout in “Heat” and set the thriller “Collateral” in a taxicab, has had an affection for automobiles since growing up in Chicago.

“It’s a city in which you drive, you know?” Mann says. “It rains and things get quite beautiful. The streets get black and the cars get reflective. I like motion. I like speed.”

Mann has also been a racing hobbyist. Off and on for years, he competed in the Ferrari Challenge — a four-day race, he fondly recalls, during which “the rest of the world just goes away.” So, the driving instructions that Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver) gives in Mann’s latest film, “Ferrari” — “Break later, hold the line” — are familiar to him.

“Let me put it this way,” Mann said, grinning, in a recent interview. “At one point I was practicing on a road in Atlanta and I did 75 laps without stopping.”

But what Mann remembers from those laps — or at least the four of five good ones he strung together — is the taste of what real mastery of the car might feel like.