Ferrari Fever
The 2024 Ferrari Daytona SP3 is a breathtaking car. Its body is a masterwork of evocative swoops and curves. The 829-horsepower, V-12 beast with a 211-mph top speed is a fitting homage to the three Ferraris that swept the 24 Hours of Daytona in 1967.
This machine commands at least $2.2 million, more than 45 times the price of the average new car. But paying is the easy part. One does not simply walk into a Ferrari dealership and buy a brand-new car. To own the Daytona SP3—or any of the company’s ultra-exclusive models—you’ll have to convince the legendary Italian automaker that you’re worthy.
Whenever Ferrari hatches a new ultra-limited-edition vehicle, it’s exclusively offered to the folks at the top of a clandestine list of clients who have spent tens of millions of dollars on its cars. Built in numbers of a few hundred at most, the full production run is all but guaranteed to sell out before the public has seen a single photo. To get on the list, you’ll need to the ranks of the most dedicated Ferrari collectors.
Founder Enzo Ferrari approached the concept of supply and demand with ruthless savvy: “We will build one less car than the market wants.” Today, the company cultivates a similar exclusivity. Ferrari had a banner year in 2023, selling nearly 14,000 cars worldwide; U.S. Ford dealers move that many F-series pickup trucks in an average week.
Ferrari currently has six models in its regular lineup, including a $400,000 SUV called Purosangue, Italian for “thoroughbred,” and the SF90, a 1,016-horsepower hybrid supercar with a $550,000 starting price. Beyond this realm is the Icona Series, described by Ferrari as a limited run of cars that “use a modern aesthetic to reinterpret a timeless style, with . . . the highest performance possible.” The Daytona SP3 is the latest edition. Before that came the Ferrari Monza, a street-legal car with no roof or windshield, designed to evoke the open cockpit of a race car. Ferrari vowed to build just 499 examples of the $1.8-million Monza, each to the exacting specification of a hand-selected client. The Monza sold out immediately.
Collectors have long puzzled over the intricacies of Ferrari’s secret pecking order. “The code breakers of World War II had it easy compared to the way the points system is figured out at Ferrari,” says Donald Osborne, an automotive historian and appraiser and the CEO of Audrain Motorsports.
Some general guidelines apply. To get on the list, you’ll need to build a rock-solid relationship with a Ferrari dealer. When you’re just starting out, this means buying pre-owned—because unlike conventional automakers, Ferrari doesn’t stock its showrooms with new cars for customers to drive home. Practically every new Ferrari sold is built on special order. “That provides this almost immediate secondary market, which is what Ferrari dealers live on,” Osborne says.
“It started happening in the mid-2000s,” says Matt Farah, host of The Smoking Tire podcast and founder of Westside Collector Car Storage. “You had to buy a used Ferrari in order to become a known client to get a new Ferrari.” Once you’ve purchased a few pre-owned cars, it’s time to get on the radar at headquarters in Italy by putting in an order for a brand-new car.
Each year, Ferrari divvies up order slots—called allocations—among its dealers. Each dealer gets a strict number of allocations for each Ferrari model. Dealers have total authority in choosing a customer for each allocation. As a first-timer, you’ll probably have to make do with whatever allocation the dealer throws your way. “Most people can’t walk into a dealer out of nowhere and say ‘I want to buy a Daytona SP3,’ ” Farah says “It’s like, no, dude, you gotta get 10 cars first.”
Because resale value is a major concern, the fledgling collector should carefully consider customization—the options, from paint color to interior upholstery to dashboard trim and all sorts of other details, that can double the price of a quarter-million-dollar car. “The more bespoke your car is, the tougher it is to along to someone else,” Osborne warns. Choosing a violet paint job with pistachio interior isn’t playing the long game.
“It’s a pretty different thing when you look at it as an asset,” says Gioel Molinari, a tech entrepreneur and founder of Autostrada Westport, an automotive-themed clubhouse and event space in Connecticut. “You consider whether you’ll be able to resell it . . . and you start configuring cars in a way that’s not your actual preference.”
There’s also danger in going too conventional. “You go in and order your red-over-tan Ferrari with no options, they’ll think, ‘he’s going to try and sell this as fast as he possibly can,’ ” Osborne says. “The dealers don’t like to keep giving allocations to people who are flipping cars.” It’s possible to sell your special-ordered Ferrari for more than what you paid for it, even before the car is built, to someone who wants to cut the line. Avoid this temptation. “That only works for a certain amount of time,” Osborne says. “You don’t want to lose your reputation with the dealer and the manufacturer.”
The border between reselling and flipping can seem like an absurdly fine line. “When they say they don’t want you flipping, what they mean is, they don’t want you flipping on the open market,” Farah says. “The wink-wink is, if you don’t want to keep the car, you sell it back through us.”
“There’s a right way and a wrong way to do it,” says Jeff Segal, who races Ferraris professionally and operates Modificata, a company that converts newer Ferraris to the no-longer-available manual transmission. “You have an arrangement with your dealer—I’m going to go drive this car for 500 miles and as soon as I’m done with it, I’m going to bring it back to you, you’re going to give me my next latest, greatest special edition and we’re just going to keep the door revolving. If you get the timing right, your car habit almost pays for itself,” he says.
Glance at the website of a dealership and you’ll get an idea: Row after row of preowned cars, all of them practically brand new, listed with prices that often reach well beyond the initial MSRP.
“When one of [the small group of anointed buyers] wants to let one go, there are all these other people who aren’t part of the access economy,” Farah says. “That’s how these cars are instantly worth more than they cost the second they go out the door.” While every new car has a manufacturer’s suggested retail price, a used model can be sold at whatever price the market s.
This practice goes well beyond Ferrari. When the Ford GT came out in 2018, customers were chosen via a lengthy application process. To prevent profiteering, each new owner was required to sign a contract banning them from reselling their new GT for two years. Recently, Porsche implemented a selective allocation policy on its GT2 and GT3 sports cars, which inevitably led to speculation, flipping and dealer-customer scheming. These off-kilter dynamics extend beyond the automotive world. If you’ve tried to buy a Rolex lately, you’ve probably found a dozen resellers happy to give you an unworn second-hand timepiece at an 80-percent markup.
“It’s an asset class where access is incredibly valuable,” Farah says. He describes high-end car collectors who buy new limited-production models, simply to avoid getting bumped down the list. “And if you don’t want it, you sell it back to the dealer for a profit, and they sell it as a used car for hundreds of thousands of dollars—even millions of dollars—over sticker to people who don’t have access,” he says. “It’s a circular money-printing machine.”
In the recent era of zero-percent interest rates, “you had a lot of excess capital and very inexpensive credit chasing a relatively small number of hard assets,” Molinari adds. Ferraris, once subject to the same depreciation as your typical Toyota, became an investment vehicle. “The goal of the purchase was not to enjoy the vehicle, but to put cash into something that wasn’t going to deflate and lose value.”
There’s another way to become a Ferrari collector that doesn’t involve the allocation merry-go-round: Vintage cars. But bring your wallet. “The most expensive Ferraris out there were all built more than 50 years ago,” says Randy Nonnenberg, the founder of Bring a Trailer, a live online auction platform for classic, collector and enthusiast cars. In late 2023, classic car insurance specialist Hagerty compiled a list of the highest-priced vintage cars ever sold at auction. Eight of the top 10 were Ferraris, including a 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO that sold last year for $51.7 million at an RM Sotheby’s auction in New York.
The 250 GTO is widely considered one of the most beautiful racing sports cars ever made. Its value hinges on its gorgeous curves, its rarity—only 36 examples were built—and its competition history on the world stage. In 1962, the GTO cost $18,000, roughly $184,000 today. Enzo Ferrari personally appointed each would-be owner.
A former racer himself, Enzo openly viewed the business of selling road cars as merely a way to fund his racing teams. Of the 10 most expensive Ferraris ever sold at auction, eight have been race cars, the cheapest of which hammered at $18.4 million. “Basically, any time in the past 20 years, if you bought a Ferrari sports racer with a good history, you’re going to make money on it,” Osborne says.
“The vintage ones can be somewhat more stable than the brand-new cars,” Nonnenberg says. Eye-popping prices and the fact that the most desirable classics rarely change hands, tend to push out the quick-flip profiteers.
“The car you lusted after at 17, you buy at 40,” Osborne says. “Nostalgia is a very strong motivation for collecting.” In 1969, the Chicago Tribune published a classified ad for a used Ferrari GTO asking $3,500. At the time, it was an out-of-date race car, no longer competitive. By the 1980s, the children who watched the GTO in its racing heyday were grownups with money. Car-collecting fashion mogul Ralph Lauren paid $650,000 for a GTO in 1985; a year later, another collector paid $1 million for one, then sold it two years later for $4.2 million. In 2018, David MacNeil, founder and CEO of WeatherTech, bought a GTO for something north of $70 million.
Ferrari race-car fever can sometimes seem nonsensical. Last year, a buyer paid $1.875 million for a 1954 Ferrari 500 Mondial. From the auction photos, you’d think that price was a typo to the tune of three zeroes. The car’s body was a crumpled ball of bare, rusty metal. The disembodied engine sat on a wooden pallet. Proper restoration will cost more than the purchase price. But only 13 examples of this model were ever built. Similar cars have sold for as much as $5 million in perfect condition.
Nostalgia appreciation recently sent the initially faltering F50 road car into the stratosphere. Ferrari introduced it in 1995, but refused review requests from the press. When Car and Driver borrowed a privately owned example in 1997, it revealed the car lagged behind its predecessor, the legendary 1988 Ferrari F40, in nearly every performance metric. The new edition languished.
Then a funny thing happened. “The F50 is the poster child of a big runup that caught people off guard,” Nonnenberg says. “If you bought one at the right 12-month window, you could have almost doubled your money.” According to Hagerty, in 2013 you could expect to buy an F50 at auction for under $1 million. In late 2022, an F50 sold at auction for more than five times that price.
The F50 may have been panned by reviewers in the mid-nineties, but it was clearly worshipped by adolescents of that decade, who, as Farah points out, are driving a renaissance of 1990s-vintage cars. “Twenty-five years later, whatever car they had on the wall of their bedrooms, that’s going to take a spike.”
It’s tempting to try to split the Ferrari market into two conflicting factions: The purists, compelled by a love for driving, and the speculators, who might as well be swapping stock certificates. That’s a tad too simplistic, says Nonnenberg. “If the wind in your hair and hearing the sound of the engine is what does it for you, that’s one thing,” he says. “But there are Ferrari collectors that have 20 Ferraris, and their favorite part of the day is walking through the garage and looking at them. They’re all car enthusiasts.”
“Ultimately, you have to love what you own,” Osborne says. “I tell people, you should buy a car because of how it makes you feel.”
Lately, Osborne explains, the Ferrari market has begun to take a surprising turn. “The cars that the speculators buy typically remain undriven,” he says. Slowly, hesitatingly, the collector world seems to be losing its taste for cars that stay parked. “You’re not seeing the immense s for undriven cars that we used to see,” Osborne says.
That’s good news for him. In 2022, Osborne took delivery of a brand-new Roma. He’s already put more than 6,000 miles on the odometer, which counts as “high mileage” for a two-year-old Ferrari. “I bought it—oh wait, that’s right—to drive it,” he says.
It’s possible, but by no means certain, that the wild days of exotic-car speculation are behind us. “The money is no longer free, the carrying costs are real and there are other ways to generate yield that are less intensive from an overhead perspective,” Molinari says. Nonnenburg agrees. “If you’re trying to make money on a car, it has to outperform a higher hurdle than it did a couple years ago. That has changed some of the opportunist nature that I’ve seen.”
If you want to get on the list, and get first dibs at the next Icona Series Ferrari, you’ll still have to spend a ton of money getting chummy with your dealer. Given the cost of shipping, storage and maintenance, you probably won’t turn a profit on your automotive hobby. That should never be your first focus, says Osborne. “The winner is the person who buys for ion, because they will never be hurt.”
He sums up his philosophy with an analogy. “Say you decide to go on the vacation of a lifetime. You and your significant other spend $30,000 to do this three-week trip. Do you expect your vacation to pay you back?”
