Peter Farr's Blog: Zagato marks the end of an era with custom Ferrari 550 GTZ Barchetta

Friday, 30 October 2009

Zagato marks the end of an era with custom Ferrari 550 GTZ Barchetta

The very existence of this car is special. It shows that the great days of superb and beautiful Italian cars are not quite dead. There was a time when marques like Ferrari produced the running chassis and the great coachbuilders clothed the chassis in gorgeous (and sometimes ghastly!) coachwork that reflected the carrozzeria's signature style and the client's taste. Great houses like Zagato, Frua, Bertone, Vignale, Ital Design and Pininfarina, to name but a few, vied with each other to court their wealthy clients.
Sadly those days are mostly gone. Many of the carrozzerias have been swallowed up by the major car manufacturers who use the name merely as a badge for their more "up market" offerings. So nowadays if you want a Ferrari you (mostly) get one that looks like everyone else's. Some may have more spoilers or carbon fibre this and that but they still are clearly merely minor variations on a theme. In truth they are expensive variations of the boy racers' Subarus. But this one is the real thing. A gorgeous body underpinned by pur sang running gear.
Let us wonder at and celebrate such creations. We may never see their like again.

Zagato marks the end of an era with custom Ferrari 550 GTZ Barchetta: "
Filed under: Convertible, Performance, Ferrari, Specialty, Design/Style

Ferrari 550 GTZ - Click above for high-res image gallery

When Ferrari took the wraps off the 550 Maranello in 1996, it represented an important step in the company's evolution. Replacing the aging F512M (nee Testarossa), the 550 Maranello marked a shift back to front-engine V12 GTs for Ferrari - the niche market for which the company became known. But if the 550 Maranello was a pivotal product for Ferrari, the 550 Barachetta Pininfarina was even more desirable.

Characterized by its open-top format with rear cowling and leather-trimmed roll hoops, Ferrari only made 448 examples of the open-top 550 before the model line was replaced by the 575M. Another 559 drop-top Superamericas were built on the 575M's basis, but the rarest example was the solitary 575 GTZ built by Zagato for one Yoshiyuki Hayashi, an avid Ferrari collector in Japan.

For better or worse, the window of opportunity that, for a time, allowed coachbuilders like Zagato to create specials like the 575 GTZ is now closing, with Ferrari's own customization program bringing the carrozzeria tradition back to the Maranello gates - to the exclusion of others. But not before the Milanese design house gets in one last hoorah, celebrating the 90th anniversary of the first such collaboration between the two Italian houses of rolling style.

Taking five pristine examples of the aforementioned 550 Barachetta as their basis, the 550 GTZ borrows the shape from Hayashi's 575-based coupe and gives it a roadster body style. There's no word on whether any modifications have been carried out on the coupe's mechanicals, but the rolling stock appears to have carried over unchanged if that's any indication. All five examples have reportedly been spoken for at a price of £1 million ($1.6 million) apiece, which may seem like a lot for a car long since replaced, twice, but hardly too much to ask for historic artifacts of automotive Italiana.

Gallery: Ferrari 550 GTZ Barchetta by Zagato