"While sellers and auction houses often
proclaim that some of these cars are “Scaglietti conversions,”
implying that the cars were sent back to Scaglietti for a
“factory-blessed” chop job, this is simply creative used car
salesmanship."
Between 1968
and 1974, Ferrari built what many old-timers consider the last
“real” Ferrari, the 365 GTB/4 Daytona. A front engined,
350-horsepower, 4.4-liter V12 cruiser equipped with a six-pack of
Weber carburetors, the Daytona offered effortless high-speed
touring coupled with stunning acceleration.
The Pininfarina-designed and Scaglietti-built body offered phallic
good looks with a long nose, abrupt tail and an aggressive
nose-down, tail-up stance that has become one of the design
statements of the 1960s and 1970s. A well-tuned Daytona will do 60
mph in first gear, 85 in second, 115 in third, and 150 in fourth,
leaving one more gear for those brave enough to exceed 170 mph in
a car designed and engineered in the 1960s.
The Daytona was a legend in its own time, the weapon of choice for
Brock Yates and Dan Gurney in their legendary 1971 36-hour
trans-continental Cannonball Run. In its October 1970 issue, Road
& Track magazine called the Daytona “the best sports car in the
world. Or the best GT. Take your choice; it’s both.” Buyers
obviously agreed, and the Daytona became the most popular
front-engined V12 Ferrari two-seater built to date. In addition to
the 1,279 coupes, another 122 spyders were built by the factory
(these are the most recent, updated production numbers and replace
those in the most recent SCM Price Guide). These are the “real”
Daytona Spyders, and were also designed by Pininfarina and built
by Scaglietti.
GET OUT
YOUR SAWZALL
In
the late 1970s, prices for used spyders climbed to the
then-shocking heights of about $75,000, while coupes were selling
for a mere $25,000. This led to a cottage industry of converting
often well-used coupes into spyders.
While many attempted conversions, four shops did most of them:
Autokraft in England did about 10 cars; Auto Sport (a.k.a.
Bacchelli) in Modena, Italy, converted about 25; my shop, Michael
Sheehan’s European Auto Restoration, in Costa Mesa, CA, did about
28 conversions; and the Richard Straman Company, also in Costa
Mesa, CA (on the same street and only a few hundred feet from my
front door), converted about 35 Daytonas. Throw in a dozen or so
cars done by long forgotten shops and you get a total of just over
100 cut coupes.
THE MYTH
While sellers and auction houses often
proclaim that some of these cars are “Scaglietti conversions,”
implying that the cars were sent back to Scaglietti for a
“factory-blessed” chop job, this is simply creative used car
salesmanship.
Scaglietti built its first body for Ferrari in 1948, became an
exclusive Ferrari supplier around 1961, and was absorbed into Fiat
in 1969 as the in-house Ferrari body builder, much like Body by
Fisher at GM. Scaglietti neither could, nor would, take on the
process of turning a Daytona coupe into a spyder, just as GM would
not take back your 1974 Cadillac Coupe de Ville and chop its top
three years after you bought it.
The reality is that Scaglietti did supply body parts out the
backdoor for a variety of Ferraris, including Daytona Spyders,
well into the late 1980s, and so Auto Sport in Modena simply went
down the road, bought new-old-stock rear body clips, deck lid
frames and skins, top bows, header bars, latches and door glass
from Scaglietti, making its spyder conversion process faster, but
not necessarily better or worse than those of us who had to
fabricate new upper panels for our conversions.
The
conversion process varied considerably, in that many cars simply
had the top chopped off and the original coupe trim pieces
modified, while a few underwent a complete remanufacture, with sub
frame and wheel well modifications included to match those of the
original factory Spyders.
While the frame and basic body structure of a factory-built coupe
and spyder are identical, all coupes left the factory with
fiberglass inner fender wells and a fiberglass bulkhead between
the cockpit and trunk, while the factory-built spyders were fitted
with steel inner wheel wells, both front and rear, and a steel
reinforced bulkhead between the cockpit and trunk area, all meant
to stiffen the body shell.
The factory-built spyders also had extra bracing between the front
wheel well and the firewall, in the front cockpit foot wells and
through the rocker sill panels. Ferrari did this to improve
structural rigidity, but few clients were willing to spend the
many thousands of dollars required to change these panels, meaning
most spyder conversions kept the fiberglass inner structure,
making them slightly less rigid than a factory-built spyder.
DO THE MATH
So what ever happened to the shops that made
a living giving coupes a haircut? Well, we had a good run, but
eventually the economic realities of the Ferrari market put us out
of business.
In 1977 it cost approximately $20,000 and up to convert a coupe,
depending on who did the work and what additional repairs were
necessary. (Many of the cars we used had been rolled or heavily
crashed.) By 1984 this number had risen to about $45,000.
At
the same time, the prevalence of spyder conversions led to their
being valued not with the factory spyders, but as a bump to the
price of a coupe. And as the prices for all things Ferrari began
to soar in the late 1980s, it became a lot easier to make money
buying and selling, rather than going through the arduous process
of transforming a wrecked coupe into a convertible.
At the peak of the market madness in 1989, both Daytona coupes and
spyder conversions sold for about $500,000, give-or-take, while
factory spyders went for well over $1,000,000. Today things are a
good bit more realistic, with nice coupes selling for about
$150,000, while a conversion will fetch $175,000. Original spyders
are going for $500,000, a big premium, but nowhere near the high
water mark.
Today the price to complete a conversion would be astronomical,
far more than the $45k it cost 20 years ago. For a $25,000 bump in
value, it just doesn’t make sense. That’s why no one is even
attempting spyder conversions anymore—not to mention that the
patterns for the sheet metal and top bows are long gone and the
experienced fabricators have since scattered.
In my opinion, if you value open-air motoring, and don’t mind
driving a conversion, a properly-done chop-job Daytona represents
a terrific value. They will never be much more highly valued than
stock coupes, but there’s nothing like having the top down at 150
mph with the sound of the Webers sucking in front and the four
tailpipes spitting out the melody of the V12 in the rear.
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