Perfect thing for Festival of Speed is for sale

Perfect weekend at Goodwood? It would have been more perfect with this...

By PH Staff / Sunday, 12 July 2026 / Loading comments

The idea of the perfect summer car quite often coincides with what would be the perfect car to take to Festival of Speed, given the latter often manages the knack of occurring on the hottest weekend in July. Granted, with mercury creeping beyond 30 degrees - and in the face of that colossal, apparently unsolvable traffic jam - the correct answer might be a tractor with industrial air conditioning. Several OEMs, with VIPs to transport, have been known to exploit off-road routes that spit you out onto or in very close proximity to the Duke of Richmond’s lawn. If you really want to push the boat out, you can’t really beat a helicopter.

But assuming you’d like to go down the deep-pocketed, show off-y route with a supercar that a) rouses your undersides on the way there, b) turns knowledgeable heads on your way to Performance parking, c) confirms your impeccable taste once there, and d) sends a cooling breeze over your bonce on the return journey, you could hardly do much better than a Ferrari 458 Speciale Aperta from 2015. Thuddingly predictable, perhaps, but there are just 49 right-hand-drive, UK-supplied examples on the road - so thuddingly rare, too.

This, clearly, is one of them. DK says POA, but rest assured, we’re talking mega bucks, especially for one in Bianco Italia with Nero Stellato stripes. Not the Speciale you’d take to the track if lap times were the primary reason for attending - removing the roof of a mid-engined Ferrari is never free from consequence - but of course you're really buying a front row seat to the car’s primary asset: the 4.5-litre V8 in its end-of-the-road F format, where the red line appears at a euphoric 9,000rpm.

Ferrari didn’t stop building great V8s after it retired natural aspiration in favour of forced induction (better ones, potentially, if you favour the journey-quickening advantages of torque), but even they cannot capture the unbridled, manic frenzy of the final F136 in full flight. The Speciale version was the last throw of the dice too, generating 605hp when, ten years earlier, the F430 had made do with 490hp. Its 398lb ft of torque didn’t arrive till 6,000rpm.

The perfect thing, in other words, for those capillary-like stretches of B road that throng the sunny side of the South Downs. And the perfect thing for reminding you why you started liking cars in the first place. The spec doesn’t hurt either, and nor does the clockwork-like service history - one that has only had to take account of 1,200 miles in the last decade. An inevitably low total, perhaps, for a supercar worthy of any collection - but you could easily afford the annual pilgrimage to Goodwood if you were similarly miserly with the mileage.

Hopefully, you’re not. The 458, host to Ferrari’s fantabulous V8, deserves to be driven and seen and admired endlessly. We’ve even got the perfect garnish to hand: ‘458 SA’, is due to make its way under the hammer later this week. And if an Aperta is just too rich for your blood, there’s always the (significantly cheaper) prospect of a 488 Spider for less than £200k. Funnily enough, we’ve got the matching plate for one of those, too. No stone unturned, eh?

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