It may take US$10 million to buy Ferrari P4 Australia saw
A Ferrari sports car that holds a special place in Australian motorsport history is to be auctioned in Italy this weekend -- and there is talk it could fetch as much as US$10 million.
The Ferrari 330 P4, chassis number 0858, driven by New Zealander Chris Amon, lapped Tasmania's Longford circuit near Launceston in early March 1968 at an average speed of 122.2mph (196.66kmh).
That was at the last race meeting on the long straight roads and sharp corners of Longford -- and before the rain set in ahead of the final round of that year's Tasman Series for open-wheeler cars.
The P4's average speed was not topped at an Australian circuit until the country's Formula 1 grand prix moved from Adelaide to Melbourne in 1996.
Tomorrow (Sunday, May 17) that P4 will be the centerpiece of an auction within the grounds of the Ferrari factory at Maranello, near Modena.
Titled the Ferrari Leggenda e Passione auction, it will feature 33 other Ferraris and three Maseratis, but none has created the interest and excitement of the P4.
RM Auctions proudly say it is "considered by many to be the ultimate and most breathtakingly beautiful of all racing prototypes" (see here), although the auctioneers' mention of it in Australia is incomplete)
Someone else has called it "achingly beautiful", while Sports Car Digest says it is a machine with "a significant provenance".
On the website ultimatecarpage.com, writer Wouter Melissen says the P4 is "ultra rare" and the sale of it "like the Mona Lisa coming up for auction".
"Wealthy collectors worldwide are expected to bid the historic car well into eight figures," Melissen says.
In that summer of '68 Amon also raced the P4 at Surfers' Paradise, Warwick Farm in Sydney and Sandown in Melbourne for David McKay's Scuderia Veloce team.
The car's history has become blurred over the decades, but to our best recollection it was also driven by Australian Bill Brown at Warwick Farm and Bathurst, before it went to South Africa, where it was driven by another Australian, Paul Hawkins.
Ferrari only built three pure P4s, but it converted one of its P3s to P4 specifications.
Chassis 0858 finished second in the 1967 Le Mans 24-hour race in France as a coupe -- that is, with a roof.
Converted to a spider -- by removing the roof -- it won major long distance races at Monza in Italy and Brands Hatch in Britain.
In another modified form, it ran in CanAm races in North America -- for which its 4-litre engine, with Ferrari's trademark 12 cylinders and more than 450 horsepower, was stretched to 4.2 litres.
Earlier the original coupe version had been part of Ferrari's domination of the Daytona sports car enduro.
After its South African campaign the P4 returned to Europe and more success.
For the past 38 years the car has been owned, in its CanAm spec, by a low-profile American.
It has been seen publicly only at the Monterey Historics meeting in California in 1995 and 2003.
One of the other cars in the Leggenda e Passione auction is the F1 Ferrari that Frenchman Alain Prost was driving in the 1990 Japanese Grand Prix when Brazilian Ayrton Senna famously crashed his McLaren into him to claim the 1990 F1 world title.
But it is expected to bring only a fraction of the price of the P4.
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