The covers come off; Ferrari’s stunning Daytona SP3 is presented in front of you; you’re told the production run is 599 vehicles; the price is around €2m, or £2m by the time UK taxes are taken into consideration. and the first question that enters your head is: why only 599?
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It’s a measure, perhaps, of how comfortable Ferrari now is with its own heritage that the third Icona creation – the first car from the company to officially be called Daytona – is considerably more convincing than the Monza SP1 and SP2 that started the series. It’s a simply fabulous piece of design in the metal – cutting-edge construction blended with passive aerodynamics (no moving winglets here, thank you) and dozens of little nods to classic sports prototype racers of the sixties. Ferrari’s design boss Flavio Manzoni says Icona cars need to reference “past, present and future” – and the SP3 certainly does that.

New mid-engined Ferrari Daytona SP3 arrives with 829bhp V12

That the car’s 6.5-litre V12 has a few more horsepower than even the 812 Competizione (making this the most powerful conventionally powered Ferrari ever) is the sort of factoid that wealthy collectors lap up. but we’re told that around 300 of them visited the same mansion on the outskirts of Florence where the car was shown to us this afternoon, and that a few were almost moved to tears by the Daytona’s mix of curves and crisp lines more than the engineering beneath them. It has been a project led by Manzoni’s design team – albeit with the reassurance of a LaFerrari chassis as the starting point – and is all the more glorious for it.
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