The Ferrari 250 GTO is revered amongst the Maranello faithful, meaning any 599 carrying the name needs power, style, and at least the illusion of exclusivity. Power should come in the form of the stock V12, which puts out a raucous 611 HP already, tuned to 700 HP. Style is said to be inspired by the wild 599xx Concept. And exclusivity? The GTO will probably be limited to just 500 units approaching $400K a piece.

Of course, all this is based on a report from autogespot saying Ferrari is taking pre-orders for a car named "Ferrari 599 GTO Limited Edition."

Considering mint GTOs go for over $5 million at auction, this is as close as your average millionaire may get.

[Autogespot via World Car Fans]

The event was held at the Red Gate Gallery in Beijing and was attended by Ferrari owners and collectors (already sounds pretty obnoxious). The 599 China, which was created by artist Lu Hao, was won by an anonymous bidder from Shanghai with the proceeds going to Tsinghua University's Department of Automotive Engineering school with the intent to sponsor student and professor studies in Italy's Politecnico di Milano University or allow internships at Ferrari. At least they didn't get NIGO to paint it.

For someone untrained in the language of vehicular design, it’s not easy to describe what makes a car particularly Pininfarina or Bertone—but suffice to say that once you’ve seen examples of both, you will be able to tell them apart at the blink of an eye. An easy metaphor would make Pininfarina the designer of jet planes with Bertone in the business of sci-fi spaceships.

Think Bertone and you think Marcello Gandini, the man whose forehead the Lamborghini Miura sprang from like Pallas at the incredible age of 27. Gandini joined Bertone in 1965 and—following the Miura and the wonderful Espada—he went on to design cars which crave, simply crave ion drives and proton cannons, first amongst them the Lamborghini Countach.

The news last fall that Pininfarina’s Jason Castriota was to leave his employer of many years to follow in Gandini’s footsteps at Stile Bertone was quite a shocker. Pininfarinas and Bertones just don’t mix. Add to this that the cars Castriota had worked on at Pininfarina—the Maseratis Birdcage 75th and GranTurismo, the Ferraris 599 GTB and P4/5—are very Pininfarina, their aggression expressed not by sharp angles but flowing lines that hit you like an aikido throw.

Yet six months later, Castriota unveiled the Mantide, a car Bertone to its core. And while it has not become easier in the past three paragraphs for someone untrained in the language of product design to describe what that precisely is, there is one design element very easy to pinpoint: the angular rear wheelarches.

Like most things Bertone, this is from Gandini. As far as I know, he first used it on the Lamborghini Countach LP500, the prototype which served as the basis for the first production Countach, the LP400. Over subsequent iterations, the Countach lost the angularity, but the motif cropped up in later Gandini designs like the Maserati Shamal—and this Quattroporte IV that was parked the other day on the very street I live on:

By Gandini’s outrageous standards, this car is a subdued Q-ship, especially in the neutral Germanic silver this example—one of only 1,138—was painted in. The Quattroporte IV was produced at the tail end of Maserati’s doldrums, before the company was acquired by Ferrari, and this is their last car that was built in the old Maserati factory, before the Ferrari people threw out all the old machinery. There was a lull of four Quattroporte-less years at the reborn Maserati until they began building the Pininfarina-designed Quattroporte V—the latest version of which we recently drove in Italy.

It’s comforting to see how quickly Castriota has grokked the essentials of Bertone design, as evidenced by this reference to Gandini’s last car for Bertone. I can’t wait to see how he will manage over the years to balance on the shoulders of the giants he’s standing on—and what he’ll add to the Bertone canon. Based on his work at Pininfarina, one is compelled to think he will do just fine.

Photo Credit: Lamborghini, Cartype, 25ora.ro, Stile Bertone and the author

A few hours after we published our in-depth interview with Stile Bertone’s new design director Jason Castriota, I was standing by Lake Como with him showing me the secrets of his first Bertone design, the Mantide.

The front fenders melt into wings behind the front wheels then draw up into a single taut bunch—reminiscent of a calf muscle—which in turn passes under an archway similar to Castriota’s famous C-pillar for the Ferrari 599 GTB. The confluence of curves and LED’s in the back is, when viewed from a step back, a classic Kamm tail. While retaining the tried-and-true shape of the fastback, the Mantide is boldly futuristic.

But will anyone be able to drive it? There are plans to make two more examples, Castriota says, in white and green, to create an Italian flag with the addition of the first car. Then, in an email to the New York Times, he said: “We would not rule out producing as many as 10.” A price has also been quoted: €1,500,000

That's close to two million US dollars at the current exchange rate—almost two Veyrons worth of cold, hard cash. Not insignificant for a car built on a Corvette ZR1, which retails for 5% of the Mantide’s asking price. Let’s examine what you get for that kind of money, apart from the warm feeling of contributing to a company’s survival which has given us the Miura, the Countach and the Lancia Stratos.

Interior

While Jeremy Clarkson has named the Corvette ZR1 his car of the year for 2008 and our own road test editor Wes Siler called it “the best car ever made,” the fact remains: on the inside, it's all Corvette.

To whit, from our first drive:

In fact, the only thing detracting from the ZR1’s grand touring credentials is the interior. The only options on the $103,300 car are an awful set of chrome wheels and the 3ZR upgraded interior package, which succeeds in moving the interior from cheap and nasty into luxurious bass boat territory with more embroidered ZR1 and Corvette logos than my fragile mind could comprehend. We have a hard time accepting the “value” excuse; for this kind of money we’d no longer like to feel like a Jeff Foxworthy punchline. An automatic transmission is, thankfully, not an option.

Let’s see what the Mantide has to offer:

As you can see, it’s a modern European alcantara-carbon-fiber-leather affair, with the car’s hexagonal theme continuing as cutouts on the racing seats, themselves thin carbon shells. The instrument screen is the one used in the Ferrari FXX, the gearshift is a nice aluminum knob and it’s certainly got a snug racer feel to it. But it’s perhaps not as remarkable as the car’s exterior.

Certainly a major upgrade on the Corvette, though, but then that’s not saying much when you’re considering this is a two million dollar Italian super car.

Exterior

Here in Europe, the current Corvette is not liked much. It’s a big, brash American design, a brute amongst small European cars, but while it’s unarguably alien to these shores, I rather fancy its low, wide, flowing looks. In ZR1 trim, it’s a proper menace, with all the right vents, wings and scoops.

The Mantide gets rid of that all. Aside from the front-engined layout and the fastback silhouette, you would be hard pressed to tell there’s a Corvette underneath. And there is: the Mantide is not like the Italian-American cars from the 60s like the Iso Grifo or the De Tomaso Mangusta which paired an Italian chassis with an American V8. Beneath the red carbon fiber is a Corvette ZR1: LS9 engine, aluminum chassis, the works.

But what carbon fiber! It’s all sharp Bertone creases which turn into subtle arcs as you examine them up close, dihedral Enzo doors, smatterings of hexagons everywhere. The angular rear wheelarches—straight off the M577A armoured personnel carrier which transported the space marines into the doomed reactor core in Aliens—frame black Transformer wheels.

It’s dramatically new, so shockingly new that it’s actively disconcerting to take a few steps back and see its classic berlinetta profile. In person, it creates the sort of time warp the iPhone did when it first went on sale in the summer of 2007. You felt as though you were holding a sliver of 2011 in your hands.

The Mantide? I’d say it’s from 2017. Similar vehicles are on their way to leave the inner Solar System.

But then is it worth the price of 20 ZR1’s? There is, of course, no rational answer to such a question, as even the ZR1 is not an entirely rational purchase, being, as Dan Neil put it in his article The rapture of the hypercar, a big needle to deliver the combustible heroin of petroleum.

If you have space-faring ambitions on the public road, set to the soundtrack of a pushrod V8 with titanium bits, then by all means get in touch with Stile Bertone and put down whatever deposit they ask. The car geeks of the world need you to enable them to carry on the traditions of coachbuilding.

And then I saved the best part for the end. If you open the gigantic hood and peer inside, what you’ll see is exactly what you'll see when you open the hood of the ZR1 — a grinning, black Corvette Racing skull named Jake.

So even though this is not a race car, your Le Mans ass-kicking heritage is right there. And who could ask for more.

Photo Credit: Alex Conley (Corvette ZR1), Natalie Polgar and the author (Stile Bertone Mantide)

Cristiano Ronaldo, a 23-year-old player for Manchester United, lost control of his red Ferrari 599 in a tunnel near Manchester Airport this morning. After the accident, the young soccer player passed an on-site breathalyzer, which leads us to believe he lost control showing off for, or racing against team mate and goalkeeper Edwin van der Sar who was supposedly "following behind." The force of the impact was intense enough to scatter debris across the two lane road and landed a tire 200 yards from the resting place of the car, Ronaldo was unscathed and managed to hit practice later on.
[The Sun, Times Online]

Photo Credit: Getty Images

Perhaps we should expand the spectrum of our Save the Enzos campaign to include all exclusive exotics, what with all the news of totaled Maseratis, Porsche Gemballa Mirage GTs and Godzillas. [WreckedExotics]

The fact that this car seats only two, has a fire red interior, obnoxiously huge wheels and rubber-band tires, blacked out tail lights and tint dark enough to keep the cabin cool in the desert, only adds to its mystique. We can't wait to see the emails bound to result from this one — "Damn Eye-talian/Saudi oil syndicate has too much damn money! They're taking our jobs!" [TheRealJDM via Cardoman]

Look, the Ferrari is dirty! It's parked next to a curb. Its down there in the grit and dirt just like every other car. We never thought we'd see the day, but there it is.

How much for your own extra special Ferrari? Somewhere above $2 million, most likely. But don't worry, they may be doing a more affordable R8, Z06 or Spyker version. [World Car Fans]

The gents over at World Car Fans are reporting some very impressive specs including a target of 600 horsepower and 600 Nm of torque (~442 lb.ft.), all wheel drive routed mostly to the rear meats, and a less than five second run to 62. That's Cayenne Turbo and Cherokee SRT territory (only). The word on the tubes is that some kind of concept will be debuting at the 2010 Geneva show. In any case, if it makes it to the street, we look forward to test driving the eventual result, and then lambasting it with witty puns about Honda Civics and bad punk rock.[World Car Fans]

Specs:

Specifications - standard version

* Engine: V12
* Power: 620 hp (456 kW) at 7600 rpm
* Max. Torque: 608 Nm (448 ft-lb) at 5600 rpm
* Performance: Top speed > 330 km/h (> 205 mph)
0 - 100 km/h (0 - 62 mph) est. 3.7 s

Features as opposed to the production car:

Engine available in 2 output levels:

* Level 1 - F599 GTB
Recalibrated ECU, modified intake system, performance exhaust system and high-flow catalytic converters; Realized output: est. 650 hp.

Level 2 - 630 GTB

* 6.3 ltr. FXX - engine conversion; Realized output: est. 750 hp.

Wheels:

* 20" racing wheels
* Front: 9.0x20, offset 27 with Pirelli tires 245/35R20
Rear: 11.0x20, offset 42 with Pirelli tires 305/35R20, painted wheel face and stainless steel outer rim. Upon request the wheels can be painted in custom colors.

edo/KW sport suspension:

* Racing suspension technology for the road with adjustable compression and rebound damping. Independently adjustable compression and rebound damping permits truly individual suspension setups. The unique system, with its three different adjustments, allows for low-speed compression damping characteristics to be altered while the highspeed settings, having a strong influence on ride-quality, remain constant.

Sport spring set

* Color red,
* lowering rear: 40 mm, front: 20 mm

edo performance exhaust system

* Newly developed high-flow exhaust system with electronic butterfly valve control (remote control to adjust the sound intensity available upon request).

"Here is the first proof that Ferrari is working on a new Dino. These exclusive pictures are showing a mule of the new car. Based on a 599 body, it doesn't yet give away so much - but at least a little of what will become the new Dino.

What identifies the test car as a mule for the Dino is the engine sound, or should we say the lack of it. It clearly doesn't sound as sharp as a F430 for example.

The Classic Dino was built between 1968 and 1976, and its name honours the founder Enzo Ferrari´s son, Alfredino "Dino" Ferrari, who died in 1956 at the age of 24 from a muscular dystrophy. While that vintage Dino had a V6 behind the driver, the new one will be powered by a V8 with 400 bhp. Ferrari will most likely start with a Coupe, but expect a Spider later on. There is a high possibility that Pininfarina will do the design work with input from former Ferrari design boss Frank Stephenson, who now heads Fiat´s Centro Stile operation.

The new Dino will be starting at approximately 100-110.000 Euros. Insiders are saying that it's possible to sell up to 4000 Dinos annually once the car gets the green light for production. Such a figure would instantly double Ferrari´s yearly production and give the make a whole new group of customers. Talk is also about the new Dino to be built at the Maserati factory in the city of Modena. This city is very important to the history of Ferrari, as it is the town where its founder Enzo Ferrari was born. Even if Ferrari is still denying the project, we expect to see it on the roads in 2009."

The kids over at VODCars have assembled a tight little package of explosive Prancing Horse goodness in honor of the marque's 60th anniversary. In fact, we're just playing it over and over, listening to the engines while we write. Seriously. Yum. We think we might be high. We're at the very least lightheaded. – Davey G. Johnson

Related:
Ferrari Celebrates 60th Birthday With Live-Action Shell Commercial!; James Glickenhaus Shows off His Toys; James May's First Ferrari [Internal]

Related:
Satan Laughing Spreads His Wings: C/D Cracks up the 599 Fiorano; Ride the Pentagrams: Ferrari Launches 599 GTB Fiorano [internal]

Will the Corvette SS get Delphi's magnetic suspension technology? [Straightline]

Related:
Spy Photos: The Corvette SS Is Now The Red Devil; Spy Photos: I Am The Corvette SS Powertrain Mule [internal]