Ferrari has released a beautiful new one-off supercar, and we all know what that means: a certain percentage of our venerable readership has already scrolled to the bottom of the page to leave a comment about how it's slower than a Tesla, bad for the planet and a rolling fossil from a bygone age. Which is fine, and certainly true, and we do enjoy hearing from you guys, so feel free to pop down the bottom of the page, stick the boot in and get that out of your system before reading further!
With that out of the way, Ferrari is describing the P80/C as its most extreme one-off design ever. Built for an anonymous customer with a long family history of Ferrari fanaticism, it's effectively a 488 GT3 race car, unshackled from any racing regulations and limitations and treated to an entirely new body kit. Thus, it's both more powerful and aerodynamically superior to Ferrari's own race car, which made it a blast for Ferrari's GT race driver Alessandro Pier Guidi to test during the development phase on the company's private Fiorano racetrack in Maranello.
Not even a little bit road legal, the P80/C's interior is almost identical to the 488 GT3, including the roll cage, race harnesses and racing steering wheel. Indeed, the GT3 provides the entire drivetrain and chassis, but where the GT car appears to be restricted to 592 horsepower, the P80/C isn't. No mention is made about this car's final power figures, but considering that the 488 Pista rolls with 710 hp, it seems reasonable to expect at least that from this multi-million-dollar one-off.
Which leaves us with the bodywork, which is a totally custom job by Ferrari's design team styled to echo two of the client's favorite race machines, both from the mid-60s: the 330 P3/P4 and the Dino 206 S. Here they are for reference:
Low hoods, then, with big arches over all four wheels, smooth wraparound windscreens, prominent air intakes on the sides and a sexy flat rear of the cabin with more or less no rearward vision.
Looking at the P80/C, then, it's hard not to notice that it looks a lot more like a 488 than either of those voluptuous designs. Still, there are visible nods. The wheel arches look to have been exaggerated by an inch or two, the rear of the car seems to flare upward where the standard 488 tapers down, and the side air intakes have been exaggerated and cut to follow the lines of a very sexy wraparound windscreen that flows into the side windows and disappears back under the flying buttresses that define the shape of the rear. The back window is just about obscured by an aerodynamic mini-wing designed to channel air back to a giant main wing.
Underbody aeros go fairly bonkers, with a whopping front splitter that looks like it could be used to mow the lawn, complete with upturned wings at the sides. Likewise the side skirts also flick up at the rear, and the carbon rear diffuser setup is colossal. All told, Ferrari says its downforce is well balanced between the axles, and offers "an improvement of around 5 percent in overall efficiency, required to make full use of the unrestricted engine."
While this car will definitely be called to account for itself on track, the customer wanted something he could parade around at concourse shows as well, so Ferrari made it a "dual soul" machine. You can pull the rear wing off, and replace the 18-inch single-nut race wheels with spunkier-looking 21-inch rims when you need a car that goes with an evening gown rather than your Nomex race suit.
Only one will be built, and you can't have it. You'll probably never see it again. So jump into the gallery or click on the 12-minute documentary video below for a closer look, and don't forget to let us know how vastly, shamefully, hopelessly inferior it is to an electric car in the comments. We shall attempt to pass your scorn on to the owner if we can elbow our way past his teetering piles of money.
Source: Ferrari
