Meet Julie Hunter & Anthony Moss, the Aussie Couple Organizing Supercar Tours in Italy
Issue #82
Julie Hunter and Anthony Moss may not be Italian or live in Italy, but judging by the quality of the tours they organize here, you would never know it. Partners and life and business, the Melbourne-based couple is the brains behind Ultimate Driving Tours, which organizes tours throughout Europe and beyond that give guests the chance to get behind the wheel of incredibly powerful and sleek supercars while enjoying the destination and all of its cultural attractions.
Marco and I were lucky enough to join them for part of their Taste of Tuscany trip last fall and we were blown away by how incredibly organized the tour was and how well they had curated the stops along the way, from coffee at a cafe with original ceiling frescoes in Montepulciano to an aperitivo on a private terrace in one of San Gimignano’s medieval towers. This interview with them was conducted in conjunction with my feature for Dream by Luxury Escapes, an Australian travel magazine. I’m thrilled to share it as part of my series of interviews with entrepreneurs and creatives in Italy.
Can you remind me where in Australia you're from?
Julie: Anthony's from Sydney and I'm from the Gold Coast, like an hour south of Brisbane, but we live in Melbourne.
Anthony, how did you first become interested in motoring and this whole world of supercars?
Anthony: I always had an interest in cars and driving and when I was in my late teens, early 20s, a group of us used to get together and go to a racetrack, like a motor racing circuit, and we'd hire an instructor, and then we'd all take out cars and drive around and do laps at the circuit.
So I got involved in doing that, and then being the organizer that I always sort of was, I started to meet people in that world and then we competed in a few car rallies in Australia and I met one of the owners of these events and wanted to do one in my hometown. So I convinced him that it was the right thing to do and I would run it and it ended up being Australia's biggest privately run motor racing rally business at the time. That was in the early 2000s. So we ran a national rally series.
We were the biggest in Australia for a few years and we ran that together with another friend of mine and then when that came to a natural decline, I got more interested in going overseas and going to Europe—Italy and Switzerland and Germany—places where you could drive on these amazing roads. I started to put an idea of a couple of trips together a year and put it out into that database I had from that experience of running those events back at home in Australia.
What was the first trip that you did in Europe?
Anthony: It was a trip that started in London. We had the group meet then we took everyone out to Cannes and we had a whole lot of cars that we rented from a supplier and we drove down through France all the way to Switzerland and some of the Alps and then came back up to the Nurburgring in Germany. And then we had another supplier that we rented cars from in Germany and then back to the UK. So it was a pretty big European Odyssey like one of those Grand Tours.
I didn't really realize at the time how crazy it was, but it was a big trip. It was 2,500 miles so nearly 4,000 kilometers we did over a week. So things have definitely changed with regard to what the business looks like now.
When did you guys add the Taste of Tuscany trip?
Julie: The first time we ran that trip was in 2021, so it's a fairly new offering for us, but it's an area that we have found has just got a huge amount of demand. I mean, it's beautiful driving roads, the food and wine is incredible. It's got a beautiful cultural and architectural aspect to it as well. The cities are great.
So for us in terms of moving away from being so driving oriented, as Anthony was saying, where it was like a bit of a boy's trip and it was driving big kilometers, we now look to balance our experiences to be a beautiful mix of the driving but also the food and the wine and being a little bit more immersed in the region.
I was really impressed by the way you guys achieved that balance between satisfying the desire to be in these incredible cars and driving these beautiful scenic roads but also time to rest and take a little break, with really amazing places to visit. So I was curious to hear a bit more about how you plan those itineraries.
Julie: Owning the cars has given us a bit of an advantage there because when we were renting historically, people would say, “You know, it'd be so nice if we could just hang out and not do any driving today or just do a half day” and things like that. And when you say, “Well, do you mind if we have a fleet of €100,000 euros for the day just sitting at the hotel?” everyone's like, “Oh my God, no, let's go drive.”
So owning the cars and not having that kind of limitation means that we can split the days a little bit more. The way we like to plan our events is to have those half days or those rest days where people can do a wine tasting or go truffle hunting or have those local immersive experiences.
If you really want to drive from dawn until dusk, we might not be the right experience for you. We’re definitely more couple-oriented for people who are looking for some adrenaline and some adventure, but also want to get into the hotel and have a glass of Champagne or Franciacorta, have a spa treatment, have a beautiful dinner and relax and spend time together as a couple and as part of the group and just enjoy the region as well.
So how much time do you guys spend scouting out those places that you then bring us to?
Julie: I can't even tell you honestly. We spend a huge amount of the year in Europe and whenever we're not on an event we're always doing reconnaissance. Even if we're not technically doing reconnaissance, we still are always doing reconnaissance. I'm always looking at little alleyways and looking for interesting places. We found this tiny little bar down the side streets and we've got a Google Map and it's just dotted with hundreds or thousands of dots where every road we drive we mark down. Was it a good road for a drive or was it something that might be good for a transit leg or something like that?
We're always marking down cafes and restaurants and bars. And if we drive past a cute winery or anything wherever we go, we're constantly recording data and information and we've got this huge database that we're constantly adding to and updating and checking and rechecking. We'll drive a road one year and be like, “Oh, the conditions are not great.” But we have to go back every year or two and check it again because they do a lot of roadworks particularly in Switzerland where the roads tend to get ripped up with the snow in the winter and things like that. A road that might not be a great one year could be incredible the next year. So we literally spend probably thousands of hours a year on Google Maps looking at locations, then when we're driving we're looking at locations in real life.
I mean we're already midway through 2025 calendars and are about to launch the 2025 events. We're planning things 18 to 20 months in advance, or longer even because we're trying to launch all of our events 18 months in advance, so it's a lot behind the scenes.
Do you tweak the itineraries every year?
Julie: Definitely. I've already made changes to some of the routes that we’ll drive on and in terms of the experience we're always looking to just try and improve it by 1%. Maybe there was a bit of friction behind the scenes or something that wasn't so smooth for the guests. I'm sure it would be things that people would never even think about, but for us, we can feel it. And so we want to remove that for next year.
What they say is, it's harder to get from 90 to 100% than it is to get from 60 to 90. It's those tiny, tiny improvements that we're always looking to make and to keep our business the best that it can be.
I really liked all of those little elements of surprise as well, like the aperitivo at the home of the people from Tenuta Torciano in San Gimignano. How did you get them to open their home and host us for that aperitivo?
Julie: That's the other big part of it. It's forming close relationships with the partners that we work with because often you're asking for favors or you're asking for things that might be beyond the norm of what a group would want. We’re trying to create a very, very specific experience. We know exactly what our guests like and sometimes it might be a bit culturally different than the normal way that it's done in Europe.
So even with wine tastings, I've often found that the wine tasting approach in Europe is to kind of immerse people and explain. Whereas, particularly with Australians and maybe Americans, they like to have a drink and relax and then kind of go into the knowledge part. So sometimes you're making little tweaks just to preempt what a guest is going to want before they might even know.
I talked with one of the guests who also mentioned that you guys seem to know them so well and know exactly what they want, which is very impressive. Does that just come with the experience of doing these tours year in and year out?
Julie: It does. I mean, we know our guest base very, very well. What we do is quite high-touch. When people come on an event, often we've known them at least on paper for 12 to 18 months in advance. So you get to know a lot about who they are, what they like, what they don't like, what they're celebrating, who they're coming with.
From the beginning, you know a bit about them, but then the event starts and you get this group of people together for the first time. And all of a sudden they come to life off the paper and you're constantly making tweaks on the fly. As an event organizer, you're sitting at the table having dinner and you're curating the conversation around you, but you're also watching what's happening. Who's eating? Who isn’t? Maybe the meat is not cooked well enough for them or something like that.
And so you're making those notes so that you can update the restaurants going forward. Like “Mrs. Smith prefers to have her meat well done, so can you just make sure we don't serve her medium rare Florentine?” or something like that. So you're constantly evolving the event so that the next time that they have meat put in front of them, if their preference has been to have it more well cooked, then all of a sudden it's done.
And that's those little tiny things that you're always trying to improve. So people don't have to make the decision for themselves. It's frictionless travel. We like to design the events so that everything you have or everything you do is what you would choose for yourself, but you don't have to make that decision. You can just relax.
That was something that came up in my conversations with the other participants in the trip as well. It was all so meticulously planned and organized. Even during the rest stops, we all went in for a coffee or whatever, but while we were inside the cafe, your team was out checking the cars and making sure they were all good to go.
Julie: Absolutely. That's another part of what you learn over time. There's only so much time you can spend in a stretch and it's figuring out how someone would feel at a certain point. Will they feel tired? Will they need a rest? Will they need to go to the bathroom? Do they need some water or coffee? And while that's all happening, the team are also taking the fuel levels, checking any engine lights and parking the cars as well—just making sure that they're all parked up easily to get the group going back on the road again.
Can you imagine if all of you guys had to jump in a car and then watch each car do a three point turn and move forward and then we're stuck there for another 20 minutes while everyone's trying to turn the cars around? All of that stuff is part of the frictionless experience where you just pull into a driveway. We park you the easiest, fastest way that is feasible in that environment. You get out, you're relaxed, you’re refreshed, you go to the bathroom, you have your coffee, and then you come back out and the cars are ready to go in the most frictionless, easy, fastest way again.
I also appreciated the daily briefings in the morning. Anthony, what was it that you always said in the mornings? About how it's not a race, it's a ladies’ and gentlemen’s drive or something like that?
Julie: I've heard that speech before and that's exactly what it is. I mean, there's no prize for first place. It's not a race to the finish. We want to enjoy the experience and to think about it as a ladies’ and gentlemen’s drive, but as a guest you're also helping to curate your experience.
So, for the guests who are looking to have a little bit more of a what we would call a spirited drive, they'll naturally tend to drift forward within the convoy and the guests who are looking to have a little bit more of a relaxed drive and enjoy the scenery or perhaps are swapping partners and maybe it's the wife getting behind the wheel for the next leg and she doesn't want to be up front with cars behind her wanting to go faster.
That's why we like to have the radios in the cars. Guests help each other out and move around the convoy. And so we like guests to know that they're welcome to help with the positioning and to be in charge of where they want to be in that sense.
Yeah, I think that was another great aspect of it—just having the radios and not having to look at Google Maps and navigate for ourselves.
Julie: Absolutely, especially in Tuscany. Gosh, we've gone down some crazy roads in Tuscany. It's quite stressful when you're traveling. There's one partner who's usually made the plans and invested a lot of time and resources and energy in putting things together and then obviously, it's very rare that you have the opportunity to go ahead and to see if the place is what you expected it to be.
Imagine if you're traveling internationally and you're turning up at a hotel and the hotel down the road was a better choice, but you couldn't have figured that out and then it's a bit of an argument or whatever. We've gone and looked at every five-star hotel in Tuscany and most of the five-star hotels across Europe, really.
We know which live up to the pictures online, which are not that great or which might not be best for the cars. Imagine the amount of five-star hotels we've gone to that have terrible driveways or parking or access or something like that. We just wouldn't be able to take a Ferrari there. Imagine you rent a Ferrari in Italy and then all of a sudden you've got it parked somewhere on a street in the middle of nowhere.
I was hoping that I might be able to quote the thing that Anthony would say every morning during briefings about how it's not a race, it's a ladies’ and gentlemen’s drive or something like that.
Anthony: That's pretty much what we say because there's a lot of these things that go on at these rallies and races. We like to say we are ladies and gentlemen and we're there to enjoy the scenery and the cars and and each other and there are other people on the road. I think that's definitely important.
You can have these wonderful cars to drive, but you have to be respectful of the surroundings. And first of all, we try to employ that. I mean, obviously, you have people who want to drive the cars a little quicker in some places and that's fair, but also I think it's important that we try and have people's heads in the right place.
And you guys always make sure that the guests rotate the cars so every guest gets to try every car in the fleet?
Julie: Exactly. Yeah. We like to have guests be able to experience all the cars back to back.
How many of these tours are you guys doing per year now?
Julie: We're running about 10 to 12 driving experiences and then we also have our Formula One and motor sport hospitality as well like the Grand Prix in Monaco where we charter a superyacht. And then we also have the self-guided drives that are happening and we would probably run about two dozen of those a year now.
So that's a growing part of the business and that's also been a benefit of having the fleet as well. When the cars aren’t on tour, we can arrange for the self guided experiences so guests get to take them and go into a curated drive where it's just the two of them, perhaps on a honeymoon, but the route has been mapped, we've driven all the roads, the hotels have been inspected, and everything's organized and put together in a little package.
Are you guys launching any new tours for 2024 or 2025?
We’re actually in the early stages of putting together a new winter driving experience, which will likely be in Switzerland or Austria. And so we're looking to feature a fleet of luxury SUVs on that experience. So this would be beyond our internal fleet, but we would be looking at having Lamborghini Uruses or Rolls Royce Cullinans, Bentley Bentaygas, Ferrari Purosangues and do a winter driving experience up into the Swiss Alps or the Austrian Alps and then do a bit of a track-based ice driving experience for a day and then a little bit of skiing and some of the winter sports and then back to back to the main city again. So that'll be quite a cool experience because very few people will have driven all these SUVs back to back because a lot of them are quite new to the market.
Further Reading
You can see the current issue of Dream by Luxury Escapes here. Flip to page 80 for my feature about Ultimate Driving Tours.
All the details about their Taste of Tuscany tour can be found here.
You can read about more of the tours they offer in this article by Robb Report.
Be sure to check out the rest of the interviews in this series here.