Why Is This Dirty, Priceless Ferrari Daytona Sitting in a Museum?
After 40 years lost in Japan, Ferrari will restore it. Until then, museum-goers can gaze at it in all its filthy splendor.
Can you imagine writing a check for roughly $2 million for a car that is so filthy you'd probably want to wear a hazmat suit to inspect its interior? Things are a little upside-down in the barn-find world anyway, and when the car in question is a one-of-one variant of the legendary Ferrari 365 GTB/4 Daytona, it all makes a little more sense.
0:00 / 0:00
Before we get to why it's sitting, unwashed and worse for wear, in the Museo Ferrari in Modena, let's figure out why it's so dirty. The car first surfaced in 2017 through an RM Sotheby's auction. It had been sitting in storage in Japan for 40 years, having been imported out of Italy just a couple years after it was originally registered. It went through several hands before one Makoto Takai bought it—and then it sat, despite some efforts by potential buyers to purchase it from Takai, according to RM Sotheby's.
Every Daytona is special, but even by Daytona standards this one is unique. Chassis no. 12653 is allegedly the only road-going Daytona to wear a lightweight alloy body designed for the company's motorsport division. In addition to the lightweight body panels, it also features Plexiglass covered headlights and side windows, and was slathered in Rosso Chiaro paint over Nero leather.
With 36,390 km on the odometer, the car sold for $2.2 million at that auction—filth and all. Now it's turned up at the Museo Ferrari, and it's on display at the time of this writing. It's apparently awaiting a full restoration by Ferrari's Classiche department. It certainly needs it—we can't imagine what 40 years of static storage does to a rare Ferrari's soft and hard materials. At least it's in good hands, and should make for quite the conversation piece for museum-goers—or nightmare fodder for any auto detailers who happen upon it.
Like a lot of the other staffers here, Alex Kierstein took the hard way to get to car writing. Although he always loved cars, he wasn’t sure a career in automotive media could possibly pan out. So, after an undergraduate degree in English at the University of Washington, he headed to law school. To be clear, it sucked. After a lot of false starts, and with little else to lose, he got a job at Turn 10 Studios supporting the Forza 4 and Forza Horizon 1 launches. The friendships made there led to a job at a major automotive publication in Michigan, and after a few years to MotorTrend. He lives in the Seattle area with a small but scruffy fleet of great vehicles, including a V-8 4Runner and a C5 Corvette, and he also dabbles in scruffy vintage watches and film cameras.
Read More
