2013 Ferrari California Spider - 2k Miles - Daytona Scuderia Navigation Carbon on 2040-cars

Auto blog

Ferrari launches F14 T and yet another Formula One nose

Ferrari CEO Luca di Montezemolo said of the 2014 Formula One season, "It's time to win." This is the chassis that's meant to do it, and it is also Exhibit C in this wild, function-over-form F1 pre-season: the Ferrari F14 T. The low, trunk-like snout is another imagining of the year's regulations, after the probing proboscides found on the McLaren and in the image of the coming Williams. The public name of the chassis internally called 665 was chosen by Ferrari's social media fans, F14 T referring to the brand, the year and the turbocharged powerplant, not the McDonnell-Douglas F14 Tomcat.
The 60th Ferrari to contest an F1 season, it keeps the pull-rod front and rear suspensions of cars from the last two years but little else. The narrower front wing, having to package and cool the additional power unit equipment, reworking the rear wing and even moving to brake-by-wire has changed every other aspect of the car.
Fernando Alonso is hoping the F14 T will make the fifth time the charm; in his fifth year with the team, he wants to win the championship this year instead of coming in second again, just like Michael Schumacher won his first title with Ferrari after five years with the team. Our guess is that Kimi Räikkönen has no opinion on anything other than winning races and getting paid for it. A press release below offers a number of details, while the high-res gallery above to can help prepare you for what's coming.

Ferrari pays tribute to Niki Lauda with one-off 458

Though Niki Lauda may today be chairman of the Mercedes F1 team, anyone who's seen Rush will know that he's inexorably tied to Ferrari. And it's that bond that Ferrari has celebrated with this special-edition 458 Italia.
Commissioned by an evidently dedicated fan through Maranello's Tailor Made program, this one-off 458 features a red paintjob with white roof and gold wheels. It's a livery that apes the cars Lauda drove for the Scuderia in the mid-70s, and carries through with tricolore racing stripes over the roof and throughout the red-stitched black leather interior.
Not the most subtle treatment we've seen, but then the Italia is hardly a subtle car to begin with. Lets just hope this particular example manages to steer clear of going up in flames as have so many 458s - and one notable 312 T2. Feel free to read more in the press release below.

Second day of RM's Monterey auction continues the million dollar madness

RM Auctions' two-day event during the Monterey car week is pretty much a matter of appetizer and main course. Friday night's appetizer saw a trio of multi-million-dollar Ferraris, along with a pre-war Mercedes-Benz and a Jaguar D-Type. You can read all about those beauties right here. But as we said in that post, the action would really happen on Saturday night. The prices listed below include RM's ten-percent commission fee, and, as you'll see, the auction house did pretty well for itself.
We've already told you about the $27.5 million winning bid for the 1967 Ferrari 275 GTB/4 NART Spyder, with all the profits headed to charity. While there were more seven-figure winners on night two, the overall prices weren't quit as high as we saw on Friday night. The Ferrari F50 (pictured above) shown during the car's Geneva debut back in the 1990s and with only 1,100 miles on the clock took $1,677,500 (on a $1.25 to $1.6 million estimate). Another winner was a 1935 Hispano-Suiza K6 Cabriolet, which brought in $2,255,000 on a $1.5 to $2 million estimate. A 1974 McLaren M16C Indianapolis, the race winner of the 1974 Indy 500, brought home $3.52 million, essentially doubling its expected price of $1.25 to $1.75 million.
The night wasn't a success for everybody, though. The 1928 Mercedes-Benz 680S Torpedo Roadster, which took Best In Show at the 2012 Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance failed to reach its $10-million expectations, selling for $8.25 million. That's not peanuts by any stretch, but a car that only goes for about 80 percent of its expected price isn't something to be enthusiastic about. A 1960 Maserati Tipo 61 Birdcage, which was expected to go for $3 to $4 million only took in $2,090,000.