A 26,000-mile Ferrari 365 GTB/4 Daytona Project Build Is For Sale

This Ferrari GTB/4 Daytona is not, at first glance, in the greatest condition. Missing a great many parts that should be safely beneath its iconic panels, it seems to be a wasting shadow of the car that left the factory in 1971.

But it’s not. It will soon be for sale as a project that contains every part known to be missing from it; every part that is necessary to return it to full glory. Nor is it a wreck: after being crashed, further damaged during the recovery and then decades stored with different owners who all failed to bring to life their dreams of a restoration, its bodywork is all Ferrari-sourced and new – or genuine period Scaglietti.

The story of chassis 14273 begins when its UK-based owner collected it from the factory in Maranello before driving it with appropriate vigour to the Monaco Grand Prix. Naturally. After plenty of gentlemanly use and a few services, it changed hands twice; in 1972 and 1974. Some time after that – the history is incomplete – it was crashed and ran down a slope.

The nonchalant recovery agent then wrapped chains around its precious bodywork to drag it up the hill again; an act he frankly should have been jailed for. This now heavily-damaged Daytona was sold to someone with more imagination than money and/or engineering ability, and his aim to remake the car as a 365 GTS/4 Daytona Spider came to nothing except bills. He sold the car to someone else who thought they could make a success of it.

Whether they could or not is irrelevant: they didn’t. The bent, broken and roofless GTB stood forlorn for almost 30 years without being touched. A further custodian, a friend of the man who had left the car to lie, bought it in 2006 and has spent 13 years painstakingly filling the gaps in its parts list and restoring the bodywork to better than new shape.

Now the car, once an icon of the era, is in a position to be restored properly. The bodywork has been made perfect by illustrious coachbuilder Alwin Hietbrink, the chassis has been restored to basically new condition and there are dozens of boxes of components that the current owner has accumulated. It needs a full mechanical restoration and rebuild inside and out, plus of course a paint job. Not cheap work, if done properly, but what an opportunity.

The car retains its original 4.4-litre V12, albeit separately at the moment. Initially seized after nearly 30 years in storage, it was dismantled to reveal internals in “remarkably good condition” - ideal for a trouble-free restoration. Another nice touch, the original speedometer with 26,117 miles displayed, is still in the dashboard.

It will be sold on the Collecting Cars online auction platform. You can view over 200 photos of it right now in the Coming Soon section of the site. If you want to bid, though, you’ll need to be a verified user. And wealthy.