New car news

15 December 2009 - 16:00

The ultimate Ferrari?

If you had a lot of money - and we mean, like, a lot of money, a sort of quite-close-to-infinite amount of money - with which to create your perfect, custom-built Ferrari, would you order a gold, convertible 599?
 
No? Well, tough. Because you don't have a swizillion dollars. But Edward Walson does. He's the son of John Walson, the man who invented cable television, and he is Very Rich Indeed.
 
Last year, Walson Jnr approached Ferrari's Special Projects Programme - established after Pininfarina created James Glickenhaus's P4/5 and Ferrari realised it could create an in-house division to grab a bit of the ultra-lucrative one-off market - to develop a car to his very exacting specifications and very expansive wallet.
 
So say hello to the Ferrari P540 Superfast Aperta, a coachbuilt 599 convertible modelled, apparently, on the gold Ferrari from the 1968 short film Toby Dammit (nope, us neither).
 
The Aperta took 14 months to build, with much of the work going into strengthening the chassis to deal with the loss of the roof. Still, the Aperta is just 20kg heavier than a stock 599, thanks to extensive use of deliciously expensive carbon fibre.
 
Walson opted to leave the 599's 6.0-litre V12 (which is, admittedly, a masterwork in standard form) unchanged, which seems a touch odd to us. Surely if you were spending gazillions of dollars creating your own unique Ferrari, you'd demand a tweak or two to the engine... just to make it special, like?
 
So what do you think of Mr Walson's one-off? And, more interestingly, if you suddenly found yourself in possession of a frazillion dollars, how would your ultra-unique Ferrari be shaping up?