Amazing 640 hp Ferrari 550 GTP!
by Alex Michalas  The uniqueness of any Ferrari is undoubtable and you will
agree with me that Prodrive, the British Tuner/Engineer that is responsible for many racing successes including Subaru's multi-championship-winning Impreza rally car, is a force to be reckoned with.
What do you get, then, when you have Prodrive taking care of the
Ferrari 550's assault to the European and American Le Mans Series (ALMS) and the whole project is supervised by Peter Stevens (yes - McLaren F1's designer)? Something really really hot: the
all-new Ferrari 550 GTP. The car is a stripped out version of the original 550
. We are talking about a special engine upgrade that sees the Ferrari V12 up to 640 hp (from the standard car's 485 hp). We are talking
about reconstructing the biggest part of the 550's body with carbonfibre in a weight-saving effort that sees the weight reduced to 1100 kg from the standard car's 1690 kg). What this gives us
is a power to weight ratio that is twice that of the original car's.As a result, the 550 GTP will not have the slightest problem to go past 200 mph (320 km/h).
And...the really interesting detail is that Prodrive and Ferrari have confirmed that a limited number of Ferrari 550 GTPs will be made available to the "public" for an undisclosed price. So you too can get
behind the wheel and challenge for the ALMS title! The undisclosed price part does sound a bit tricky though - we would expect it to be at least $500,000 (which is just a rough-FantasyCars.com staff guess
given that the standard 550 costs around $250,000). One way or the other, let's welcome another extreme FantasyCar to the world!
And let's discuss about it in the FantasyCars.com MessageBoard by clicking here! |
