The world of coachbuilding has produced some beautiful and unique creations—some so bold that automakers themselves wouldn’t dare tackle. Fortunately, coachbuilders around the world have more creative juices flowing through their veins and can invest the time and money needed to build fantastic one-off creations. One such example is being built at this very moment, and will serve as an homage to the historic 1962 Ferrari 250 GT Breadvan.
The Breadvan was originally a one-off Le Mans entry commissioned by Count Giovanni Volpi in 1962. The man responsible for building it was none other than former Ferrari chief engineer, Giotto Bizzarrini and coachbuilder Piero Drogo. Their canvas—given that Enzo Ferrari wouldn’t sell the Count an all-new 250 GTO—was a 1961 Ferrari 250 GT SWB, a car which Bizzarrini knew intimately from his time with the Italian automaker.
Bizzarrini was tasked with making it faster than the all-new 250 GTO and Drogo would be responsible for the design. The end result is perhaps the most famous Kammbacked shooting brake in history, a Ferrari affectionately called the “Breadvan.”
Fast forward to the modern day and you’ll find a new designer named Niels Van Roij who has famously created a number of shooting brakes based on modern platforms like the Rolls-Royce Wraith and Tesla Model S. After seeing the 250 Breadvan take on the Jaguar E-Type at Goodwood, a client approached Van Roij to build out a modern interpretation based on the iconic Ferrari. The designer took out his sketchbook and began work on revitalizing the Italian classic, and soon the world will enjoy the fruits of his labor.
Van Roij reached out to an old friend and commissioned Dutch coachbuilder Bas Van Roomen for the job of transforming his drawings into a tangible product. Van Roomen is no stranger to Van Roij’s designs. In fact, the two had previously collaborated to build the handsome two-door Range Rover Adventum Coupe.
A Ferrari 550 Maranello was chosen as the donor car. Van Roji says that the 550 shares a “spiritual” connection with the original 250 GT. Both were front-engined, had naturally aspirated V12 engines, and sent the power to the rear wheels—a recipe that had been all but abandoned by Ferrari since the Daytona. It was only natural to select the car for the firm’s unique project.
The car’s bodywork was quickly chopped and loosely framed with steel profiles to resemble the shape of the car’s end-goal. Van Roomen then sculpted a buck from industrial plasticine (the same material used for automotive modeling clay) overtop of the frame to create a template for the aluminum bodywork that would be later be formed by hand.
Now, nearly two years after its inception, the homage to the iconic Breadvan is nearly complete. Van Roij teased a photo of the car undergoing a full respray in the Ferrari’s iconic red paint on Instagram and said that onlookers could expect the car to be launched “soon.”
It’s interesting to see any coachbuilder modernizing an absolute classic like the Breadvan. By trimming weight and using a platform old enough to avoid all sorts of safety-mandated electronic mollycoddles, one can truly experience a present-day interpretation of what engineers like Bizzarrini and Drogo built decades ago.
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