Ferrari has always kept the production numbers of its hypercars as low as possible.
That’s not only because they have been out of financial reach for most people, but also to maintain the exclusivity and residual value that buyers of these cars demand, all of which has made them the icons of their time.
Only 272 examples of the original Ferrari 288 GTO were made, followed by a much larger number of Ferrari F40s (1315), 349 Ferrari F50s, 400 Ferrari Enzos and 499 LaFerraris (and 210 LaF Apertas). So why 799 of the new Ferrari F80 hypercar?
“I would say it’s the end of a long discussion that we internally had and compared it also with what we did with LaFerrari,” Enrico Galliera, Ferrari’s chief marketing and commercial officer told us at the car’s launch in Italy this week.
“You may know LaFerrari was 499 (examples) and basically we just try to understand how much the world has changed and how much our client profile has changed. So basically, we should have limited the number according to the number of collectors we have in the world that grew up in the last 10 years.”
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According to Mr Galliera, Ferrari tried its best to create enough cars to satisfy its absolute top-tier of collectors, while also keeping the numbers down. The 60 per cent increase in production numbers over the LaFerrari is taking into account the massive change in terms of well-heeled collectors during the last decade.
“We kept the number as low as possible, considering the amount of requests that we are having… they are all sold out,” he said.
“I would answer in a different way, which is the big problem we have today is to manage clients that didn’t get an allocation. So yes, and we have a huge discussion with big collectors that, unfortunately, we were not able to satisfy.”
How Ferrari intends to make clients that missed out on an F80 happy remains to be seen. What we do know from Ferrari’s historic dealings is that any buyer that takes delivery of an F80 and sells it for a profit immediately will be very much frowned upon for any future special models.
However, if you are searching for a meaning to the 799 number, in terms of why it’s not 899 or 699, it seems that Ferrari has got its own internal measurement system to work out where that optimum number is.
“The number is the consequence of an analysis of how much [the number of] our customers grew up and how to find a combination that maintains a very high exclusivity while not disappointing too many clients,” said Mr Galliera.
Priced at 2.9 million Euro (A$7m), the Ferrari F80 is also significantly more expensive than the LaFerrari, which started at 1.2m Euro.
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