Speciale in the Greater Bay Area

Hello everyone 大家好！I’m based in Zhuhai , South China, and I’m currently on the way to Ferrari Guangzhou to pick up my 458 Speciale.

I’ve been living in China since 2009, I’ve been hunting for a 430 for a year but eventually gave up due to the poor condition of these cars in here. I decided to hunt for a 458 and things didn’t get much better.

I checked over 15 cars the last six months, test driven 8-10 and they were all rubbish.

I finally got lucky a few weeks back, in a Foshan garage (guy also had a Xbow and a Carrera GT mirage (go figure ). After sending my own mechanic then shipping it to the Ferrari dealership for a final inspection, I got a green light

Should be able to drive it back home in a few hours. Car is in great shape. 17k km , only “regret” is the fake stripe (sticker ) which I’ll remove as soon as I can do it properly.

Cheers!

 

I did put some here : https://www.ferrarichat.com/forum/threads/speciale-finally-got-mine-in-china.652273/#post-148256740

But didn't take many pics for now. I'm too busy driving that beauty around

 

Thanks

Correct, after spending so much time test driving pure piles of crap, the only viable option was a double plated car from Macau. From the docs in there, looks like it was imported from Germany. It's left hand drive, which is easier for me to drive in the Guangdong area. I was considering HK since Blackbird had a super clean Speciale in stock, but RHD + yearly MOT (meaning a roundtrip every year at least) + super expensive insurance + the need for a roundtrip every 3 months made it impossible due to Covid situation.

So I ended up with a double plate which I took over from the previous owner. I usually take down the Macau plate since I'm driving it in Guangdong, and the plate isn't necessary unless I cross borders. If I keep the two plates on top of each other, it blocks the aero which is silly.

I can't really cross the border at the moment since I'm a foreigner (it would mean 21 days quarantine on return), so every 3 months, a guy from my garage takes it for a round trip to activate its allowance. If Covid wasn't a thing, I'd do the roundtrips myself ...

 

Of course I asked for a cold start, which he obliged, but no revving obviously. Just the cold start made me shiver though. And his selling price is not even abusive, considering this is a China based car (1m$)


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Shot a few quick videos too

 

No worries

To clarify, "piles of crap" were 458 Italia. I was originally targeting a "simple" 458 but couldn't find any car in good shape, when I finally stumbled upon my Speciale.
Had to prop up my budget a bit but the car was pristine, well maintained by a careful owner.

They aren't many Speciale on the market in here, maybe 3-4 publicly listed.
And yes, you might find it hard to believe but in China, many Ferrari owners just go for the most expensive model they can get, in order to show off. But they have no clue about what they're buying or about the brand history. Car culture is just getting started over here.

Yes, you can always find passionate owners, but the ratio of rich people who don't really care about what they're driving as long as it's the most expensive and the most rare is quite high VS other countries I figure.

PS : now hunting for a 430 Spider to add to the garage. It's going to be a long road.

 

Track is pretty empty these days, I'm doing testing sessions every couple of weeks, mostly on a race spec GT86 because I want to preserve the Speciale

And... borders are now re open

 

ridiculously high. This plus the combined Ferrari “China premium” puts the 296GTS at about … 710k$ with some basic options ‍