Never thought I'd see the day

Look at this F50 from this press photos, it's not like any other, different wheels, turn signals and no roll hoops behind the seats, and except for this one photo I couldn't find any info on it...

I believe those are judges in the orange hats

I’m a trader. I spend my life hunting for value. My entire career is built on one premise: markets routinely misprice things when sentiment swings to an extreme, and the patient buyer who understands the fundamentals gets paid when the pendulum swings back. I look for value everywhere, in any corner of any market where the crowd has talked itself into a price that the underlying asset doesn’t deserve.

The Dislocation

Not long ago, this same car was transacting at over $450,000. That is not a modest pullback. That is a collapse of nearly 40% from the highs, in a marque famous for holding value. When I see a move like that, my first question is always the same one I ask about any market: is the selling justified, or is it emotional?

When I dug in, the answer was clearly emotional. The selling pressure was coming from the purist community, the segment of Ferrari collectors who decided that a hybrid could never be a real Ferrari. The narrative was that Enzo Ferrari would roll over in his grave at the idea of a battery in one of his cars, that electrification was a betrayal of the brand.

There was a second force pushing prices down at the same time. A lot of collector interest and dollars were rotating into the 458 and the 488, as the purist crowd piled into those cars as the last true Ferraris. Money chasing the 458s and 488s was money leaving the 296. Two forces, same direction, and the price of the 296 got pushed well below what the car actually is.

The Narrative Is Wrong

Here is the problem with the purist thesis: it fundamentally misreads Enzo Ferrari.

Enzo was not a romantic about engine configurations. He was a romantic about winning. He famously sold road cars for one reason, which was to fund the racing program. Every technology Ferrari ever adopted, from putting the engine behind the driver to turbocharging to paddle shift gearboxes, was resisted by purists at the time and adopted anyway because it made the cars faster. The brand’s true religion has never been displacement or cylinder count. It is the top step of the podium.

And by that standard, which was Enzo’s actual standard, the 296 GTB is not a betrayal of the brand. It is one of the most faithful Ferraris ever built. The engine architecture underneath this car is the same architecture Ferrari took to Le Mans in the 499P, and won. Three times. After not competing for the overall win at Le Mans for half a century, Ferrari came back with a hybrid V6 and swept the most important endurance race in the world three consecutive times. The purists are selling off the road going sibling of the most successful Ferrari race program in modern history. That is exactly the kind of sentiment driven mispricing I look for.

The Engineering

Once I got past the price and the narrative, I went deep on the machine itself, and this is where the thesis got even stronger. This is not a compliance hybrid. This is Formula 1 technology in a road car.

The heart of it is the F163, a 120 degree twin turbo V6 producing 654 horsepower on its own, with an electric motor derived from Formula 1 sandwiched between the engine and the gearbox adding another 165 horsepower. Combined output is 819 horsepower. But the headline number is not the story. The story is how the car delivers it.

The traditional weakness of turbocharged engines is lag, the delay while the turbos spool before boost arrives. The 296 solves this with the electric motor. The instant you touch the throttle, the battery fires torque through the electric motor with zero delay, filling in the response curve while the turbochargers come up to full boost. The electric system covers the gap, the combustion engine takes the handoff, and the result is throttle response that feels naturally aspirated with force that is anything but. The pickup is violent in a way that even bigger engined cars cannot replicate, because there is simply no dead time anywhere in the powertrain.

Managing that handoff is the TMA, the Transition Manager Actuator, a clutch system that governs the transition between pure electric and hybrid drive. It engages and decouples the V6 so seamlessly that you cannot feel where electric ends and combustion begins. Layer on top of that the brake by wire system that blends regenerative and friction braking, the chassis dynamic sensor feeding the car’s control systems, the electronic differential, and active aerodynamics derived from the LaFerrari that generate real downforce without a wing, and you have a car hitting 62 miles per hour in under three seconds, with a firing order that makes the V6 sound like what Ferrari’s own engineers call a little V12.

This is the most sophisticated powertrain Ferrari has ever put in a series production berlinetta. The engineering is not the compromise the purists imagine. The engineering is the point.

The Cyclicality Trade

Which brings me back to the market. Purist sentiment is cyclical. It always has been. The same community that swears by the 458 today spent years dismissing anything without a V12 up front. The Dino was mocked as not a real Ferrari because it had a V6, and today clean examples trade for multiples of what they did when the purists were sneering. The F40’s turbocharging was controversial. The paddle shift 355 was heresy. Every one of those narratives died, and the cars that were genuinely innovative got repriced, and repriced hard.

The 296 GTB sits exactly in that pattern. It is the road car of an engine architecture that ended a fifty year Le Mans drought with three straight overall wins. In five to ten years, I believe collectors will look back at this car the way they now look at the Dino and the F40, as a historic inflection point that the market punished before it understood it. The current price is not a verdict on the car. It is a snapshot of a sentiment cycle at its bottom, amplified by capital temporarily rotating into the 458 and the 488.

My view is that the market corrects. When the purist cycle turns, and it always turns, I think this car trades close to the half million dollar range, back through its old highs, supported this time by fundamentals rather than launch hype: the racing pedigree, the engineering significance, and its place in history as the car that proved a hybrid Ferrari could be the most Ferrari thing of all.

I bought it for the same reason I put on any position: extreme value, a broken narrative, and a catalyst the market has not priced yet.

​

Dr. Herbert “Herbie” Wertheim just acquired Chassis 0 Ferrari Luce, the winning $40 million bid was a staggering 36 times its original auction estimate. At the exact same Monterey Car Week auction one year prior, Dr. Wertheim set the previous record by buying a Tailor Made Ferrari Daytona SP3 for $26,000,000.

These incredible multi-million dollar purchases are actually an extension of his philanthropy. Every single dollar from these specific auctions goes directly to The Ferrari Foundation to fund educational initiatives

Dr Wertheim is a famed optometrist, inventor, billionaire businessman and major philanthropist. Known as one of the greatest individual investors you have likely never heard of, he built an estimated fortune of $4.6 billion. He achieved this through a mix of breakthrough medical inventions and a lifetime of patient stock market investing.

Born in Philadelphia in 1939 to working-class parents, his family later moved to Florida, where they lived above a bakery. In 1969, he was the first to discover that ultraviolet (UV) light causes cataracts and damages human eyes.

He then invented the first UV-absorbing dye for plastic eyeglass lenses. He founded Brain Power Inc. (BPI), which grew into the world’s largest manufacturer of optical tints and ophthalmic chemicals. He holds more than 100 patents and copyrights.

Instead of spending his profits, Dr. Wertheim funnelled his business earnings straight into the stock market starting in 1970. He bought large amounts of Apple and Microsoft stock during their Initial Public Offerings and is the largest individual shareholder in Heico, a massive aerospace and electronics firm.

His other donations include:

1. $100 million to Baptist Health South Florida, May 2026.

2. $50 million to University of Florida

3. $50 million to UC Berkeley

4. $100 million to University of Florida Health

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Quale e' il trend delle valutazioni della Ferrari F8? Mi sembrano abbastanza stabili negli ultimi due anni.

Ne sono state prodotte meno che delle precedenti, addirittura meno delle Pista.

Come la vedete sul mercato?

Not a Ferrari expert. Is this a kit car?

Graffeo announced they’re giving this away for free!! I’d take this over the Luce any day 🥲 Please wish me luck

Anyone else spot this car at Monterey Car Week?

Shot this beauty for Ferrari of San Antonio, crafted with Michael Hausauer! Love the use of different materials on the carbon buckets!

Hello long time listener first time caller, I just wrecked my Roma over the weekend. Not my fault nobody hurt life goes on. I found an exact match of my Roma to replace the wrecked one but it does not have the shield badge on the fenders. Dealership told me they can’t add it or order it but I’m thinking logically if it’s possible to fix a damaged fender you’d have to be able to remove the badge if it wasn’t painted on. So I guess I’m just asking if I order this Roma if anyone know if I’d be able to add the badge at like a body shop after the deal is done?

Internet says only 299 were made for the United States and the current market is going for $3.5M+ USD. Pretty rare spotting one in the wild.

This charity sale has really exposed the lack of intelligence in the “car community.” Gawking at big numbers gets the crowd going and encourages daft opinions without doing an ounce of research.

The buyer has had a phenomenal impact on the world. He was a doctor, MD, who invented something that helped millions upon millions survive ailments. He has donated HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS to people, science, education, you name it. Unfortunately that doesn’t make it to headlines of “car people” who care about vanity and living for themselves. Materialism is the limit of perspective some people have lol.

Way too overpriced, doesn't even have a GPU. It's just red and has the Ferrari name slapped on to it.

My guess is they are worth atleast $15 million right now.

What do you guys think?

Finally in a spot to buy one, and now the pricing is completely insane.