This Long-Tail LaFerrari Prototype Is What Ferrari's LaFerrari Would Look Like If It Actually Looked Cool

I've got a hot take for you: Ferrari's first hybrid hypercar, the 2013-18 LaFerrari, is easily the worst car Ferrari has built in decades. I'm not anti-hybrid, I think that is the only cool part of this car, in fact. But I hate everything else about this car. The name is bad, it looks atrocious, and it's extremely dumb that at this point, the owners of these cars have had to replace the hybrid battery because they don't put enough miles on the car to keep the batteries from conking out. It should have been called the F70 (just as the Enzo should have been called F60, but that's a fight for another day), and it should have looked like this car right here. At least with the V12 engine, it sounded good.

Mecum

Built over a year before the first LaFerrari models were delivered to their new owners, this prototype vehicle known internally as the "F150 Mulotipo MP1," is exactly what the car should have been. This is a car with some ungainly bodywork, uneven panel gaps, exposed carbon fiber, and a stripped back racing-inspired aesthetic that harkens back to the 1980s icon, the F40. Not only does this car crib from the Ferrari parts bin a lot more aggressively (see the 458-style headlamp assemblies for proof?), but it just flows better as a form-follows-function build than the production car. 

This Mulotipo served the Ferrari engineers to develop the V12 engine and its integration with the F1-inspired HY-KERS hybrid system. From March of 2012 through August of 2013, the engineers put some 22,000 miles on this chassis in order to validate the powertrain for production readiness. Between 2011 and 2013 at least half a dozen prototypes were built and driven, though this was the first to be based on the proposed carbon fiber chassis exclusive to the LaFerrari. Many earlier prototypes were built from stretched and modified 458 Italias.

This particular car has been sold before, as it was a headliner at Mecum's Monterey auction in 2022, where it sold for $1,595,000. Other LaFerrari prototypes, particularly the two that wear standard LaFerrari clothes, have sold for more. The 2014 PS1 prototype brought $2.5 million at the same Monterey auction in 2022, similar to the $2.45 million number brought by the 2012 P2 prototype in dazzle camo, which sold earlier this year at RM Sotheby's Arizona auction. Will this oddly-shaped-but-in-my-opinion-prettier LaFerrari have appreciated in value since 2022? Even if it goes for three million, it's still a much cheaper way to experience this kind of Ferrari speed than a street-legal LaFerrari. A low-mile example sold at RM Sotheby's Miami sale in February for an eye-watering $6,880,000. 

Mecum

This car would make for perhaps the coolest trackday car of all time. Not only would you have paid a fraction of a "regular" LaF, but you would have a high-mile regular-use example that won't lose value with miles added. Go take it out on track, as it isn't street legal anymore anyway, and have a blast. And look cool as heck doing it. 

If you're interested in bidding on this wild long-tail machine with one-off Ferrari components and hand-assembled care, then you'd better get your butt in a seat and get a bidder paddle in your hand when it crosses the dais at Mecum's upcoming Indianapolis sale. It's lot S140 going up on Saturday, the 16th of May. Bring a fat stack or two, because it won't go cheap. Or maybe it will, it is a no-reserve listing, after all. If you can get this thing home for less than a mil, you've won the game. Here's hoping you are the only one in the room who feels like owning this matte black monster.