Ferrari Enzo

Ken Okuyama drew it at Pininfarina and made no attempt to be liked. The nose is a Formula 1 quotation, a narrow raised centre section flanked by deep intakes with the front wing shape carried across, and the cabin is pushed forward into a bulbous canopy so the V12 and the aerodynamics can have the rest. The doors hinge up and forward. The tail is largely open, dominated by the diffuser and a rear spoiler small enough that most people never notice it moving. The reaction was immediate and it never entirely went away. Bloomberg Businessweek later put the car on a list of the fifty ugliest of fifty years, singling out the V-shaped bonnet, the scooped door surfaces and the windscreen, and the criticism has been quoted at the Enzo ever since. What it also is, though, is honest. Almost nothing on the body is decorative. The scoops feed radiators, the shapes at the front set the downforce split, the underbody does more work than any panel you can see, and the car is 343kg heavier on its tyres at 200km/h than it is standing still. Twenty years on it looks less strange and more explicable.

Ferrari never raced the Enzo, and the interesting part is what it raced as instead. The works competition budget was in Formula 1, where Michael Schumacher was in the middle of five straight titles, and there was no GT class the car fitted without being rebuilt. So Ferrari did two things. The first was the XX programme, launched in June 2005: 30 FXX cars, track-only, sold to selected owners who did not so much buy a car as join a development exercise, running at Ferrari-organised events with factory telemetry feeding back into road-car engineering. Schumacher drove for the programme and was given the thirtieth car in September 2006. Most were later upgraded to Evoluzione specification. The second happened at Maserati. The MC12 used the Enzo's F140 V12 detuned to 630PS, the same Graziano gearbox under a Maserati name, and the same chassis and axle track, wrapped in a body wider, longer and taller, with the windscreen as the only externally shared part. Fifty road cars were built purely to homologate it. It then won six FIA GT teams' championships between 2005 and 2010 and two manufacturers' cups, while being barred from the Le Mans series for exceeding both the length and width limits.

The Enzo's public life has been shaped by two cars that were never meant to be famous. The first is the 400th, built in 2004 and given to the Vatican after Pope John Paul II met a Ferrari delegation in January 2005 and suggested it be sold for the previous December's tsunami victims. He died in April. Ferrari sold the car through Sotheby's that June for €950,000 and presented the proceeds to his successor. The second is the one that broke in half on the Pacific Coast Highway on 21 February 2006 at an estimated 162mph. Bo Stefan Eriksson, a former executive of the collapsed games company Gizmondo, walked away and told police the driver was a German named Dietrich who had run into the canyons. No trace of Dietrich was ever found. Eriksson served three years. Everything else is gentler. The Enzo has been a Gran Turismo staple since the PSP game and remains in GT7, appears across the Need for Speed and Forza series, and Nicolas Cage bought one. For a car with no racing record, it has an unusually crowded biography.

The Enzo is an easier car to own than its price suggests and a harder one to neglect. Cars that get used stay well; cars that sit develop the fuel, brake and hydraulic complaints that early electrohydraulic Ferraris are known for, and the F1 system is the one that shows it first. Jerky or slow shifts, a clutch that will not take up cleanly, or a car stuck in neutral usually trace to the hydraulic actuator rather than the gearbox itself. The clutch is a wear item with a percentage readout, which is genuinely useful: you know where you stand before you buy. Replacing it is not a morning's work, because the transaxle is structural and the rear of the car has to come apart to reach it. Carbon-ceramic discs were new in 2002 and they last well, but they are not consumables anyone enjoys renewing at current prices. The carbon structure is the reassuring part and the frightening part at once. It does not corrode, it does not fatigue the way steel does, and a serious impact is not something a body shop repairs. Buy the documented car.