Blast from the Past

Blast From The Past: Ferrari 458 Speciale

January 30, 2025

Event Date:

Read time: 6 mins

Author:

James Mills

Blast From The Past: Ferrari 458 Speciale

Stop the press! Someone has just paid £628,014 ($786,000) for a Ferrari 458 Speciale. That’s more than three times what one cost when new, barely 10 years ago. And it’s nearly £125,000 above the previous highest price for one sold at auction. What’s going on?

The level-headed among us will keep calm and carry on, noting correctly that this sale result – achieved at the Arizona 2025 auction run by RM Sotheby’s – is something of an outlier, a car that far exceeds the general current price trend.

Ferrari 458 Speciale values

Take a look at the points plotted on a graph of sales results around the world for the 458 Speciale – pictured below is one from our friends at The Classic Valuer – and you’ll see what we mean when we talk of an ‘outlier’. The latest, record price is (obviously!) the dot up in the top right corner. But if you’ve followed cars and their values for longer than they’ve been fuel injected, you’ll know that the thing about outliers is that occasionally they can send the market into a frenzy, like poking a stick into an ant nest and watching the resulting mania.

The new record price, tracked by The Classic Valuer, can be seen in to top right corner.

The car itself was nothing special. Which is to say, while every 458 Speciale is, as it says on the tin, special, the record-sale model didn’t stand out for any particular reason. It wasn’t box-fresh, with 5106 miles under its V8’s cam chains. (And for the record, in the UK you can buy lower mileage Speciales from official Ferrari dealers for around £350,000.) It didn’t have an ultra-rare spec. And it hadn’t come from the collection of a famous owner.

So attempting to understand what’s going on could be foolish. After all, it’s likely to be something as simple as ego: two competing bidders in the room, each with deep pockets and a win-at-all-costs mindset, trading blows and bids until one comes to their senses and the other puffs out their chest.

Record sale price of $786,000 was equivalent to more than three 458 Speciales when new

But having tested and reviewed the Speciale at the time of its launch, and also the 458 Italia it’s based on, then the subsequent 488 and 488 Pista, I think it’s more than that.

You’ll probably have heard it said that the 458 was something of a high point for Ferrari. Heck, just look at it: the Pininfarina-designed sliver of Italian goodness made people go weak at the knees, and still does. And its cabin, the minimalist genius work of Bertrand Rapatel (now at Peugeot), is just as striking, as it placed much of the switchgear (indicators, lights) on the steering wheel and introduced the virtual race engineer display to mainstream production Ferraris.

The Sabelt racing seats, with carbon-fibre backs and suede-covered facings, grab the driver and passenger with the authority of a bouncer ejecting worse-for-wear students from a bar. The aluminium floor is left bare, but pressed with ridges so your shoes don’t slide around during some particularly heavy braking into Monaco’s Bus Stop Chicane. There’s no audio system, so get used to the blare of the V8, but you can play with the Manettino switch on the steering wheel to your heart’s content, progressively unwinding the leash of the countless electronic driver aids until – if you’re blessed with the confidence of a city trader – they’re switched off entirely.

The Ferrari 458 Speciale comes into its own when you can let it off the leash at a circuit. Photos: Ferrari

Then there is the heart of the matter: a naturally-aspirated4.5-litre V8 spinning all the way to 9000rpm (much like my Honda Integra Type-R; note to Ferrari: what took you so long). Ferrari then pulled apart the standard 458 Italia and rebuilt it, raising power from 562bhp to 589bhp and turning everything up to 11 for the Speciale to make it more powerful, lighter, louder (on the eye as well as the ear) and bursting at its carbon-fibre seams with technology that means any driver can jump in and drive – fast. Much of this technology was developed in Formula One. Plenty of car companies made similar claims, but few of them stood up to scrutiny.

You bought one of because you were either a frustrated racing driver, and intended to take the car to race tracks around Europe, or weren’t content with owning a “regular” 458 Italia like every other Joe Bloggs on your Chelsea square.

Such one-upmanship came at a cost: in 2014 a 458 Italia cost from £177,406, whereas the more exclusive 458 Speciale (there are believed to have been 250 right-hand drive examples sold in the UK) raised that to £206,945 – all before the temptation of Ferrari’s extensive options list and personalisation program had overwhelmed buyers.

A spectacular driver's car

And it was good. Seriously good. Google contemporary reviews if you don’t believe me. I thought it was wonderful and felt frustrated at the time that my driving time was only on the road; a race track is where cars like the Speciale shine brightest.

Then came the 488 GTB and Pista and, they were a bit, er, meh. The zip and vim of that glorious, linear, high-revving and shrieking V8 in the 458, which demanded you really manage things via the 7-speed Getrag dual-clutch gearbox to get the best from it had been replaced by the twin-turbo 3.9-litre V8 and didn’t bear comparison. Because of both emissions regulations and an arms race between car makers, the exuberance and lust for life of that naturally-aspirated motor had made way for an experience that was, whisper it, almost generic sports car. And the astonishing agility and unflustered damping of the Speciale was curiously missing.

Yes, if you plugged in data loggers and plotted graphs, the 488 would top the 458 for numbers around any given circuit – more acceleration, more grip, better braking, brisker shift times, faster lap times – but it left a noticeable helping of emotion in the pitlane.

And it’s that emotion that buyers are craving right now. The electric car is well and truly upon us, even at the top-end of the market. So if you’re going to fill the garage with something special for a sunny Sunday blast, it really does have to be special.

But in this price bracket, that’s not enough, is it? We might not like to admit it, but cars like the 458 Speciale are as much an investment and, hopefully, safe place to put some of the year’s bonus, as they are a driver’s car. And when everyone speaks of how the 458 and Speciale in particular were high points for Ferrari, developed under the thoughtful leadership of Luca Montezemolo, it focuses the mind somewhat on where you’ll put your hard-earned money.

So it would nice to think that as there was a rush of blood to the head during the sale at the RM Sotheby’s auction, and the price crept up and up and up, the winning bidder was acknowledging that the 458 Speciale is one of the all-time great driver’s cars, a milestone for Ferrari and a masterclass in understanding what it takes to bring out the magic in every drive.