The beautiful Ferrari Enzo painted in sparkling Nero Daytona that you’re looking at above is basically indistinguishable from magic, because it used to look like this:
(Associated Press)
If you’ve been following the tech scene for long enough, this tragic scene may look familiar. It’s the aftermath of a horrific Enzo crash in 2006 involving one Stefan Eriksson, a shady executive who’d been tied up in the failed Gizmondo gaming handheld. At the time, Eriksson claimed that a mysterious "Dietrich" was driving the rare hypercar when he wrapped it around a pole on the Pacific Coast Highway going 160 miles per hour, splitting it in two — but the story unraveled, and Eriksson himself ended up in jail over a variety of charges from embezzlement to grand theft auto.
The Enzo is one of those extraordinarily rare cars, though, that basically can’t be totaled — no matter how badly damaged it is, its irreplaceability and its significance in Ferrari’s canon mean that you can be left with just a few screws and bolts and still justifiably repair the car. So in the intervening years since Eriksson’s stupidity, the utterly demolished Enzo — chassis number 135564 — has been immaculately restored to better-than-new condition, adding options and features like navigation and a rear-view camera that weren’t on the original model. The color scheme, originally red over black, has basically been inverted. And the whole thing has been certified by Ferrari Classiche, the automaker’s in-house car restoration and authentication service. For all practical purposes, this Enzo was never cleaved in two on a California highway.
The fully repaired car — with just 2,500 kilometers on the dial — went on the auction block at an RM Sotheby’s event in Paris earlier this month, selling for €1,568,000 (about $1.75 million). Not bad.
This post first appeared on The Verge.
