Ferrari’s current portfolio of cars too generic for you? How about a neat custom P540? Ferrari’s rather unique 599 convertible.
You know the deal with Maranello – money talks. If you have a practically unlimited budget and impeccable breeding the fabled F1 team’s road car division can be awfully accommodating to your design whims.
Enter Edward Walson. Doesn’t sound familiar? Well, that’s hardly surprising.
Chasing a TV dream?
Edward’s not a celebrity in his own right but his father John did invent cable TV and you can only imagine the inherited financial resources at Edward’s disposal.
So, when Edward decided he wanted a contemporary Ferrari custom built (to pay homage to the legendary Fantuzzi-designed Ferrari 330 LM built specifically for the 1968 Fellini film, Toby Dammit) it simply had to happen.
Aero duct louvres behind both axles look the business, as does the large aft deck area and superb rear wheelarch curve-line.
The P540 Superfast Aperta is based on Ferrari’s outstanding front-engined 599 GTB Fiorano. Some striking Pininfarina designed bodywork adds 66mm bumper-to-bumper over a stock 599.
Despite being open-topped the P540 is 36mm taller than a 599 and 20kg heavier, the additional weight due to carbon-fibre strengthening to offset the loss of rigidity sans roof.
Traditional V12 values
Powering Walson’s car is a 456kW 5l V12 shifting through a six-speed paddle-shift transmission.
Performance promises to be epic and kudos to Ferrari for producing the complete car from sketching to homologation in only 14 months – just in time to make this Christmas Edward Walson’s best ever.
An interesting aside to the Edward Walson project is that such a one-off Ferrari’s owner receives the car’s tooling as part of the purchase to ensure it cannot be replicated.
Conversely, Ferrari reserves the right to buy back both the car and tooling again, to ensure Special Project Ferraris are not speculated against.
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