STI Travels the Fast Lane With Grand Prix Car Tours : Vacations: Student Travel International of Northridge has expanded, organizing tours that visit foreign automotive factories and museums and take in a major race.

Richard Handin is a Santa Barbara doctor and admitted car nut who drives a Ferrari. Last year, he went on a group tour of Europe and one stop was at the Ferrari assembly plant in Modena, Italy. For Handin, seeing the factory was comparable to having “arrived in Mecca,” he said.

“I’m still smiling about the trip almost a year later,” Handin said.

Gerhard P. Widtmann is not a car fanatic and readily admits he knows little about them. But he understands how exotic cars affect people like Handin. Which is why Widtmann’s company, STI Inc. in Northridge, set up the tour that included Handin.

STI mostly arranges student tours overseas. But since 1988, it has organized three two-week tours for automotive fans centered on the Formula One races in Monaco, Italy and Britain. For about $3,000--excluding air fare--STI’s customers go to the race, visit nearby car factories and museums and take in the sights.

Group tours of Europe are a dime a dozen. But STI claims to be one of the few companies to provide tours arranged around specific car events. This year, each tour will attract 25 to 30 people from across the country, Widtmann said.

STI has competition, however. Grand Prix Tours in Costa Mesa offers several domestic and foreign trips organized around auto races. Its trips typically last one week and therefore cost considerably less than STI’s; its tour to the British Grand Prix is $1,195, for instance.

Widtmann said that despite their success, the auto tours account for only about 5% of STI’s $7 million in total revenue. (STI stands for Student Travel International, which Widtmann co-owns with Rudi Schreiner and Tim Blaschke.) But Widtmann predicted that the car excursions could provide 30% or 40% of STI’s business within a few years.

This year, Widtmann, 41, is adding a fourth tour--this one revolves around the Grand Prix of Japan. The cost is $5,000 and will include tours of the Nissan and Toyota assembly plants and trips to Mt. Fuji and Hiroshima.

Indeed, despite their affection for cars, people on Widtmann’s trips enjoy seeing the same cultural attractions that draw everyday tourists.

“The very first year, we had too many cars,” Widtmann said. “We had one car museum after another; it even got to the car nuts. They want to do sightseeing as well. They are not single-track people.”

Some of Widtmann’s customers said that what the Austrian-born Widtmann lacks in car expertise, he makes up for with his knowledge of Europe, his fluency in several languages and, perhaps most of all, his connections at the factories of Ferrari, Lamborghini and Maserati, where $200,000 sports cars are built. STI’s groups typically spend about two hours touring each of the factories.

“They’ve done their homework in terms of getting into the plants,” said Greg DeCaster, who owns a sheet-metal business in Green Bay, Wis.

Max Balchowsky, a Los Angeles builder of sports cars in the 1950s, was on the trip to Monaco last year and knew that Ferrari seldom allows tourists to shuffle through its assembly plant.

“That was the biggest skepticism I had, that we would get into Ferrari,” Balchowsky said. They did, though, and watched every phase of the car’s construction.

“I don’t believe that to this day,” he said.

Widtmann is not the only one with Ferrari connections. Grand Prix Tours also has access to the Ferrari plant, because its tour of the plant is led by Phil Hill, a former world champion race driver who drove Ferraris, said Grand Prix Tours President Barry Simpson.

Widtmann starts planning STI’s trips a year in advance. But he can’t lay out a precise itinerary until he knows the dates of each year’s races, which the Formula One organizers don’t release until the November preceding each year. And it’s crucial that Widtmann get the dates quickly so he can book hotel rooms for his clients before everyone else does.

Widtmann claims his connections come in handy there, as well. “I’m about the first one to get the fax of the dates,” he bragged. “You have to work on it.”

For their money, the tourists get tickets to the race, entrance to the museums and car plants, hotel rooms, breakfast each day and several dinners. They arrange their own flights and meet STI’s guides in Europe to start the trip, then travel by bus to each stop on the tour.

Widtmann can’t take complete credit for the auto tours. The idea came from a neighbor of his in Woodland Hills, and Widtmann tested the suggestion with trips to Britain and West Germany. “We found out people really liked it,” he said. “We discovered over time that people want not only to go to Grand Prix races . . . they want to see the car factories, museums and so on.”

Widtmann, Schreiner and Blaschke started STI in 1981, after each had worked at various travel agencies and tour operators. Widtmann started in tourism as a guide in Europe while he attended college in Vienna. He moved to the United States in 1978.

The group advertises little in trade publications. Instead, STI obtains mailing lists of car-club members so it can send promotional letters directly to owners of Ferraris, Rolls-Royces and so on.

Widtmann himself drives a Mercedes and a Toyota MR2 sports car, but said he has “to admit right away” to his tour clients that his knowledge of cars is limited. “I do not know each model they’re talking about, especially the older cars,” he said.

Not that he doesn’t try. “I’ve started reading the car magazines,” he said.