In the early years, all Ferraris were built by hand. This allowed great leeway when crafting a car for a particular customer, and unique creations were common. But the era of coachbuilt Ferraris ended in the 1960s; these cars didn’t fit into a business model based on standardized design and (relatively) large production numbers, and later safety and emissions standards made homologating such machines practically impossible. Since then, privately owned Ferraris have been modified by various sources—in the 1990s, for example, Pininfarina rebodied numerous cars for the Brunei royal family—but a brand-new one-off from the factory? That wasn’t possible…at least until Ferrari quietly opened the Special Projects department in the late 2000s.
Special Project’s mission is to create custom cars that are fully legal in their country of destination, just like every Ferrari that rolls out of the factory. This means that while the relevant smog and crash requirements must be met, each car’s interior and exterior can still be reworked in a design and engineering collaboration between the customer and Ferrari.
This concept is unique among modern automakers, even low-volume, boutique manufacturers. While small producers like Aston Martin, Lamborghini and Rolls-Royce, and really small, not-necessarily-U.S.-legal builders like Koenigsegg, Spyker and Pagani, will customize the materials and paint used on existing models, creating new body panels or lopping off a roof to create a single car, rather than a new model, just isn’t done.
The first Special Projects car was the SP1, which appeared in 2008. Commissioned by Japanese collector Junichiro Hiramatsu and penned by Leonardo Fioravanti, the man behind such Ferraris as the Daytona, Berlinetta Boxer, 308 and 288 GTO, the SP1 was based on an F430 chassis and mechanicals but wore a radically restyled body.
The second Special Projects car was the P540 Superfast Aperta, which appeared in late 2009. This Pininfarina-designed, open-top 599 was built for American Edward Walson, and both its name and concept were adopted for the later, limited-edition SA Aperta.
Special Projects produced a third car after the P540 Superfast Aperta, but very little is known about it. Its owner wants to remain anonymous, and Ferrari won’t talk about it (or any of the other cars, their owners or the inner workings of the Special Projects department in general).
The fourth Special Projects car is the 599 convertible shown here. It was built for New Yorker Peter Kalikow, who has an extensive collection of vintage Ferraris and also commissioned the Pininfarina-redesigned-and-rebuilt 612 Kappa [“Dream Machine,” FORZA #75] in 2006. The new car’s internal designation is SP-10, its serial number is 178976 and it’s called the Superamerica 45. “The 45 was Ferrari’s idea, since I’ve been a customer for 45 years,” explains Kalikow. “The first Ferrari I bought was a 330 GTC, back in 1967.”
SO HOW DID THE Superamerica 45 come to be? “The car was the product of a dinner conversation between me, Piero Ferrari and [Ferrari CEO] Amedeo Felisa back in 2008 or ’09,” Kalikow says. “At the time, they were exploring chassis stiffening for a new car, which turned out to be the Aperta but was then called the Roadster. I mentioned that I liked the roof on my 575M Superamerica, which goes up and down in like four seconds, and thought that would be a cool thing to have on a 599. That’s how it started.”
