This Ferrari Purosangue Is Going Off-Road

Though the Ferrari Purosangue is the company’s first SUV, we’re willing to bet that very few of them have ever seen anything other than nice, smooth asphalt beneath their tyres. A sweeping gravel driveway, perhaps, or a snow-covered road in a ski resort, but proper unmetalled roads? Unlikely.

One Purosangue owner, though, is planning to change that, by taking their Ferrari SUV on the Panamerican Highway, a network of roads that stretches from the top of the North American continent to the bottom of the South American one, interrupted only by the infamously tricky-to-navigate Darién Gap in Panama and Colombia.

While some of this route is made up of perfectly serviceable tarmac roads, other parts… aren’t. That’s why the German-registered Purosangue, owned by someone known as @sammyautotester on Instagram, is undergoing a bit of a transformation for the journey.

Described on the owner’s Instagram account as step one, the first modification is a set of lightweight beadlock off-road wheels from German off-road tuning specialist Delta 4x4. They’re wrapped in beefy all-terrain tyres from BF Goodrich.

That Instagram post suggests that more changes are on the way, and we can’t blame the car’s owner if that’s the case. If we were them, we’d be looking at some extra body cladding, a suspension lift, and the obligatory spotlights – partly for lighting the way down extremely remote rural roads at night, but mostly because they look cool.

What probably doesn’t need much in the way of a change is the Purosangue’s powertrain, the heart of which is a naturally aspirated 6.5-litre V12 making 715bhp. It sends that power through an unconventional rear-biased all-wheel drive system, which in fact leaves the Purosangue rear-wheel drive only in fifth gear and above.

We’ll be keeping a close eye on this project to see what other transformations the big Fezza undergoes before its even bigger voyage.