A spin in Ferrari’s $3.8 million Daytona SP3? Now there’s a terrifying offer
Ferrari’s Daytona SP3 costs $3.8m, and there are only 599 in the world. So why did they chuck me the keys to take it for a spin?
I have always assumed I would love being famous and that celebrities who complain about being constantly adored by strangers are nothing but inveterate ingrates. Recently, however, I got a brief taste of what it’s like to be in the middle of a maelstrom of love as I attempted to drive the new Ferrari Daytona SP3 – a car that’s as striking as Brad Pitt if he was eight feet tall and had gills – through a crowd of people who’d lost their minds and seemed quite willing to be run over and horribly injured, as long as they were able to video the whole thing on their phones.
For some reason, Ferrari thought it would be a good idea to show us this incredible vehicle at Le Mans in France, in the midst of a classic-car event attended by gibbering car nerds. Just getting near the car involved shouldering my way through a mass of people, every one of whom gave me a particular look that said, “Ooh, you must be a celebrity, or a racing driver, or royalty, or a billionaire… hang on, no, you don’t look like any of those, you just look scruffy. How disappointing.”
I felt mildly overwhelmed by the experience of being peered at, photographed and loathed (all the love was thrown at the car), but I was slightly distracted from that by sheer terror. You can tell by looking at the photos that this Daytona SP3 – built to celebrate the famous Ferrari racing successes of the 1960s and ’70s – is something special. What you can’t tell, and will struggle to believe, is that it costs $3,842,608. Yes, really. Only 599 examples of the Daytona, which features the most powerful naturally aspirated engine Ferrari has ever made, will ever exist – and despite that alarming price tag, they’re all sold.
Which means that any error while driving this car would be, categorically, the most expensive mistake I’ve ever made. Later that day, when a truck came around a corner towards me on my side of a narrow road, my heart leapt into my wallet and started screaming.
Part of Ferrari’s “Icona” series of limited-run vehicles, the butterfly-doored Daytona is to car design what a peacock is to other birds. Chief designer Flavio Manzoni says he wanted to create “a true sculpture, visually sensual and also dynamic”. He also says that its aesthetic can be defined as “the apparent contradiction of the multifaceted geometric forms and, at the same time, organic forms”.
The goal, overall, was bold: to create a car that someone will look at in 30 years’ time and say, yes, that was one of the icons of the 2020s. In the flesh, the Daytona SP3 is almost overwhelming to behold. You feel the desire to run your hands over it, as well as a disbelief that something so outrageous – with its straked rear, its mirrors way out on the wings, its vast rear deck – can be real.
Inside, you sit on bits of foam stuck to the full carbon-fibre chassis (the first time the company has built one since the absurd La Ferrari), which means you can’t adjust the seat; instead, you just shift the pedal box to meet your feet. The view through the tiny, Le Mans-racer style windscreen is suitably outrageous, with two huge wings rising in front of you, as if Kim Kardashian’s buttocks have somehow been separated by a bonnet.
On the road it feels wild, unhinged even, with a 6.5-litre V12 engine that makes 618kW at a stratospheric 9250rpm, and 697Nm, and there is seemingly no sound deadening in the car’s body – every rock pings into the undercarriage and your ears, making it feel like you’re driving the world’s most expensive Coke can.
And the engine noise, which Ferrari accurately describes as an “endless crescendo” of limitless acceleration, is simply beyond compare. Certainly, I never got near its end, which occurs somewhere north of 340km/h (although I did test out its zero to 100km/h time of 2.85 seconds, which was pretty wow), but the sound of a V12 as it rises beyond 6000rpm and proceeds to make your whole body vibrate – a bellow that’s a match for any race car – is something I will never forget. I even recorded it on my phone, like a total nerd.
On broken surfaces, the Daytona SP3 can feel alarming, jumpy, skittish, like it doesn’t belong on public roads. The chassis is designed to give you a pure, unfiltered sensation of the road surface for better car control, as Ferrari put it – and when you find smooth, silky tarmac, this suddenly makes sense. On the right road, on a sunny day, it will make its unfeasibly wealthy owners very happy indeed. In Race mode in particular, revving it up through the gears is an unforgettable sensation of speed and sound.
Remarkably, I have to say that the Ferrari 296 GTB, a very modern super hybrid, is actually more fun to drive, and feels faster, but I’m not saying I wouldn’t take the Daytona if you offered me one. It’s certainly a very effective way of making strangers stare at you.
Ferrari Daytona SP3
ENGINE: 6.5-litre V12 (618kW/697Nm). Average fuel 15.5 litres per 100km
TRANSMISSION: 7-speed dual clutch, rear-wheel drive
PRICE: $3,842,608
STARS: 4.5 out of 5
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