If this was real, it's the single coolest sighting I've ever seen. Genuinely was awestruck by the car, but I also know there's only like 30 of them left, so I wanted to check to see if this was real before sharing the photos and the story with friends/fam
EDIT: No need to keep clowning, I get that it's fake, wasn't sure at first which is why I asked.
Customer's 12Cilindri, in for exhaust and detail work.
Novitec sport system with flap regulation, stainless, and it's the version built around the OEM tailpipes. Nothing changes from the back. The flap moves off throttle input and drive mode, so it stays civil when it has to.
X-pipe went in with it, stainless with heat protection. That's the piece doing the scavenging work and where most of the tone change actually comes from.
Glass is XPEL Prime XR Plus, the nano-ceramic film, so heat drops without going dark enough to wreck visibility at night. Detailed after, then it went home.
F1 derived NA V12, RWD, Carbon chassis and body, Gated manual gearbox, Removable roof, 3rd flagship supercar
Is there another car that is more perfect?
I had the great pleasure and fortune of getting to shake hands with Piero Ferrari.
This 166 MM Touring Barchetta (chassis 0008M) provided Ferrari significant victories in the infancy of their racing legacy with its first win at the 1949 Mille Miglia shortly followed by victory at the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
The car will be eligible to enter the competition again in 2036
About seven months ago I visited the Ferrari dealership in Dallas in my C8 Z06, intending just to look around. I took a walk around the dealership and spoke with a couple associates then the new manager there. The manager introduced me to the sales manager and from there I got a test drive. I clearly explained to them I didn't intend on buying that day, I got to test drive anyway. I'm so glad that I did. The Ferrari is so much better than my C8 Z06. Well of course it is, it's more than double the price. Despite the Ferrari lacking two cylinders from the Z06's eight, the throttle was much more smooth and responsive. The steering felt like it was on rails, the Z06 just felt like a normal car in comparison. Then of course there is the magic of the 296 simply being a Ferrari. Sitting inside felt invigorating in a way that a Chevy cannot compare to. I love my C8 Z06 and always will because it's my first performance vehicle and how high it punches above its price point. However, it is still no match for Ferrari's entry level super car. After that day my eyes are set on a Ferrari as my next car, just have to collect the funds at this point.
Never thought I'd see the day
I’m a trader. I spend my life hunting for value. My entire career is built on one premise: markets routinely misprice things when sentiment swings to an extreme, and the patient buyer who understands the fundamentals gets paid when the pendulum swings back. I look for value everywhere, in any corner of any market where the crowd has talked itself into a price that the underlying asset doesn’t deserve.
The Dislocation
Not long ago, this same car was transacting at over $450,000. That is not a modest pullback. That is a collapse of nearly 40% from the highs, in a marque famous for holding value. When I see a move like that, my first question is always the same one I ask about any market: is the selling justified, or is it emotional?
When I dug in, the answer was clearly emotional. The selling pressure was coming from the purist community, the segment of Ferrari collectors who decided that a hybrid could never be a real Ferrari. The narrative was that Enzo Ferrari would roll over in his grave at the idea of a battery in one of his cars, that electrification was a betrayal of the brand.
There was a second force pushing prices down at the same time. A lot of collector interest and dollars were rotating into the 458 and the 488, as the purist crowd piled into those cars as the last true Ferraris. Money chasing the 458s and 488s was money leaving the 296. Two forces, same direction, and the price of the 296 got pushed well below what the car actually is.
The Narrative Is Wrong
Here is the problem with the purist thesis: it fundamentally misreads Enzo Ferrari.
Enzo was not a romantic about engine configurations. He was a romantic about winning. He famously sold road cars for one reason, which was to fund the racing program. Every technology Ferrari ever adopted, from putting the engine behind the driver to turbocharging to paddle shift gearboxes, was resisted by purists at the time and adopted anyway because it made the cars faster. The brand’s true religion has never been displacement or cylinder count. It is the top step of the podium.
And by that standard, which was Enzo’s actual standard, the 296 GTB is not a betrayal of the brand. It is one of the most faithful Ferraris ever built. The engine architecture underneath this car is the same architecture Ferrari took to Le Mans in the 499P, and won. Three times. After not competing for the overall win at Le Mans for half a century, Ferrari came back with a hybrid V6 and swept the most important endurance race in the world three consecutive times. The purists are selling off the road going sibling of the most successful Ferrari race program in modern history. That is exactly the kind of sentiment driven mispricing I look for.
The Engineering
Once I got past the price and the narrative, I went deep on the machine itself, and this is where the thesis got even stronger. This is not a compliance hybrid. This is Formula 1 technology in a road car.
The heart of it is the F163, a 120 degree twin turbo V6 producing 654 horsepower on its own, with an electric motor derived from Formula 1 sandwiched between the engine and the gearbox adding another 165 horsepower. Combined output is 819 horsepower. But the headline number is not the story. The story is how the car delivers it.
The traditional weakness of turbocharged engines is lag, the delay while the turbos spool before boost arrives. The 296 solves this with the electric motor. The instant you touch the throttle, the battery fires torque through the electric motor with zero delay, filling in the response curve while the turbochargers come up to full boost. The electric system covers the gap, the combustion engine takes the handoff, and the result is throttle response that feels naturally aspirated with force that is anything but. The pickup is violent in a way that even bigger engined cars cannot replicate, because there is simply no dead time anywhere in the powertrain.
Managing that handoff is the TMA, the Transition Manager Actuator, a clutch system that governs the transition between pure electric and hybrid drive. It engages and decouples the V6 so seamlessly that you cannot feel where electric ends and combustion begins. Layer on top of that the brake by wire system that blends regenerative and friction braking, the chassis dynamic sensor feeding the car’s control systems, the electronic differential, and active aerodynamics derived from the LaFerrari that generate real downforce without a wing, and you have a car hitting 62 miles per hour in under three seconds, with a firing order that makes the V6 sound like what Ferrari’s own engineers call a little V12.
This is the most sophisticated powertrain Ferrari has ever put in a series production berlinetta. The engineering is not the compromise the purists imagine. The engineering is the point.
The Cyclicality Trade
Which brings me back to the market. Purist sentiment is cyclical. It always has been. The same community that swears by the 458 today spent years dismissing anything without a V12 up front. The Dino was mocked as not a real Ferrari because it had a V6, and today clean examples trade for multiples of what they did when the purists were sneering. The F40’s turbocharging was controversial. The paddle shift 355 was heresy. Every one of those narratives died, and the cars that were genuinely innovative got repriced, and repriced hard.
The 296 GTB sits exactly in that pattern. It is the road car of an engine architecture that ended a fifty year Le Mans drought with three straight overall wins. In five to ten years, I believe collectors will look back at this car the way they now look at the Dino and the F40, as a historic inflection point that the market punished before it understood it. The current price is not a verdict on the car. It is a snapshot of a sentiment cycle at its bottom, amplified by capital temporarily rotating into the 458 and the 488.
My view is that the market corrects. When the purist cycle turns, and it always turns, I think this car trades close to the half million dollar range, back through its old highs, supported this time by fundamentals rather than launch hype: the racing pedigree, the engineering significance, and its place in history as the car that proved a hybrid Ferrari could be the most Ferrari thing of all.
I bought it for the same reason I put on any position: extreme value, a broken narrative, and a catalyst the market has not priced yet.
Look at this F50 from this press photos, it's not like any other, different wheels, turn signals and no roll hoops behind the seats, and except for this one photo I couldn't find any info on it...
Those are class hosts in the orange hats (which I learned thanks to intel from one of them!)