On Ferrari Friday’s, William Ross from the Exotic Car Marketplace will be discussing all things Ferrari and interviewing people that live and breath the Ferrari brand.
This week William discusses the growing trend for 6-speed manuals returning as an available option on high-end sports, exotic, and hyper-cars. Learn why your next Ferrari should be a Factory Manual.
Episode 28
[00:00:00] As part of Ferrari Fridays, William Ross from the Exotic Car Marketplace will be discussing all things Ferrari and interviewing people that live and breathe the Ferrari brand. Topics range from road cars to racing, drivers to owners, as well as auctions, private sales, and trends in the collector market.
Hello everyone! Welcome back to the Ferrari Marketplace. I’m your host, William Ross. I appreciate you guys listening. And while you’re at it, when you finish up with this episode, be sure you head on over to the Motoring Podcast Network and check out what else we have to offer. We got some really cool content over there from Mr.
Jonathan Summers. We got BrakeFix over there. We got a few others that are just really, really cool to listen. So hop on over to NPN, see what we got going on. Onward and upward. This episode, we’re going to, [00:01:00] I guess I want to discuss, everybody just talk about, is it prudent or would it, I don’t know, would it behoove Ferrari to build a new, new model?
With the factory manual six speed or seven speed. But would it, would it be in their interest, you think, to actually build a new car, new model without, with offering as a manual transmission. Now I would say, you know, wouldn’t be, you know, Hey, no, it’d be really cool. It’s in the two nine six. Um, but, you know, not just saying not a low end model, not their mid range, whatnot.
Would it be like one of the Icona series cars possibly? I don’t know. I mean, take a look what’s kind of going on in the market. Now, for those of you that listen to the episodes, you know, some episodes back I talked about doing, you know, people doing the swaps. [00:02:00] Mainly on 360s and 430s, but, you know, people are starting getting doing the 599s.
Um, and I know there’s rumors some of you are trying to do a 458 as well, that’s getting really, really tricky because that is a whole system that’s actually just dedicated, you know, how that was built and made, you know, is for a dual clutch or, you know, uh, transmission, you know, whereas, you know, your 599, 575, 550s, Uh, well the 550, I’m sorry.
Take that out of the equation. 550, all of those were built, were, uh, factory manuals. Uh, but like say your 430s, your 360s, and down to your 355s. You know, not so many of them. Um, that actually, the transmission in that car, From the factory is actually what they’ve used when you also got a manual all they did was build this Hydraulic system that you know mimicked I guess you could say or would do, you know, you do your shifting for you So it’s just doing a lot of these actuators and doing [00:03:00] all the stuff that needs to be done and do it You know, very clunky, you know, not the fastest You’re not slow, but not nowhere near as fast as they you know, dual clutches or anything like that But you know, so doing a swap Actually, it isn’t all that crazy or difficult, I guess you could say.
Um, it’s just coming up with, you know, the cables, everything like that. All the interior stuff, because you’ve got to modify the console. You’ve got to, you know, obviously do the gear selector itself. The ball, all that stuff, the gate itself, all that jazz. The big trick is, the computer, teaching it, reteaching it, formatting it, programming it to understand that, hey, now there’s a, there’s a third pedal in there that’s getting utilized, you know, shifting and whatnot for your revs, all that jazz.
So it’s just, it’s just reteaching it. So now the, obviously the big name of the game and that is EAG down in Texas. Uh, my understanding there was kind of, uh, some hubble blue going on with ownership, whatnot, fighting, blah, blah, blah. But anyways, I [00:04:00] guess they must have gotten things sorted out because they seem to be just plugging away.
But anyways, you know, they’re the big player in this game. They actually sell the kits as well. So you can just buy the kit yourself. It’s like 40 Gs, uh, and do it yourself. Pardon me. Um, and have it done. I would recommend having a shop do it because of big, you know, doing the mechanical part, not that difficult.
But. Obviously doing the computer part, but hey, you can tweak it yourself. Why not? Uh, Vin Tran, or what’s his name? Vinnie? Vin, I don’t know, he’s got his episode, he was part of Who N Get It? a while back. Uh, probably seen him, you know, putzing around on YouTube. He’s got his own channel. But anyways, back to what I want to talk about.
So out there in the market, you’re starting to see some very high end limber reduction hybrid cars come with, offered, retrofitted, With the manual gearbox. Now Koenigsegg came out with this really, really cool setup. You know, and here’s the thing when you watch it, or you see how it is, and do it, you know, it’s actually mimicking a [00:05:00] manual.
Is what it’s actually doing. So it’s not really so much it’s a manual transmission product. Percay with the clutch in that it’s mimicking it. So the computer is doing everything to give you that sensation that feel like you are actually Rolling your own, rolling the gears going through it. So, because you can actually put it into a fully automatic mode.
Or you can put it in where you got the flappy paddles. So you got three options. So is it technically, you know, a manual six feet? Yeah, I guess you could say, yeah, but I mean, it’s all done computers and stuff like that. It’s giving you that sensation to feel the clutch pedal. It’s giving you that sensation.
I mean, like that, where your pickup point is the whole thing. It’s really, really cool. The whole system. I mean, it is. Christian Koenigsegg and his team over there. They have some of the most brilliant engineers on the planet right now, what they’re doing. No offense against the guys over at Rimac and what they’re doing, stuff like that.
But, I gotta say, the Koenigsegg guys got it going on. So, and, I would love to be a [00:06:00] fly in the wild or what not. See who, you know, has these Christian ideas, you know, some of his guys or what not. I don’t know, but I got to say they have some awesome, awesome stuff going on over there. Cody’s thing is really cool.
I really respect, like that brand a lot. Love what they do. But anyways, Pagani, Pagani actually offers on their newest model, the Utopia, a full fledged auto, automatic, full fledged manual gearbox, like full on. So you got a V12, twin turbo, V12. In that car, 800 some odd horsepower, everything like that, full fledged, you can get it.
Now, you can get the, uh, flappy is the interesting thing, and this makes you wonder if this is something that is starting to become, going to become more and more common with some of these more main players or, you know, more established, I don’t want to say established brands, you know, like the big names, Ferrari, Lamborghini, stuff like that.
Porsche obviously still offers a manual on some of their models. [00:07:00] But, um, the up, the take up on that from clients, from customers, was like 90 out of the 100, it was like 95 percent of the people took the manual option. They ordered the car with a manual gearbox. And from my understanding, one or two of the people, they wanted to have it, but just due to health reasons, something, their legs or something, somewhere, they couldn’t.
Unfortunately, they just for, you know, medical reasons, do their, something with their body, legs, whatnot. They couldn’t do it because they couldn’t do the gear changes or whatnot. So, they had to get the automated, the, uh, you know, flappy pedal gearbox, as we all love to say. So, makes you go, hmm, is that something that Ferrari should consider?
So, In my opinion, yes, most definitely. I think they should. Now, see here’s what would suck. Because obviously when you look at what it takes to [00:08:00] create that, the engineering, the investment, the time, I mean, you’d have to totally design a whole manual gearbox, everything. You know, and then you get into the fact is, you know, your interior wise, because you got the gear selector, third pedal, awesome.
There’s a lot of stuff that goes into that in regards to offering that as an option in a car. So it’s like, okay, what do you do? Do you do it along the Icona series where you’re doing maybe you’ll build a couple hundred cars? Um, or do you get it more mainstream and do it on a model where you offer it?
But you’d have to like also really completely change up everything on this car So it’s like you’d have to design and build this car from the get go that you were offering a manual It’s not like for the say the 296 which again i’m gonna say would be Awesome with the manual gearbox. That would be unbelievable with the manual gearbox, you know But the thing was designed that way is designed from the get go to have a flappy paddle gearbox everything like that How the whole thing’s done up the whole nine yards your interior design everything like that I mean everything’s designed to [00:09:00] have that set up in there It’s not made designed to have this big stalk and ball sitting there between the passenger and driver’s seat and everything all that jazz And but it would look so cool Fucking cool, pardon my French.
But anyways, you know, so, do, do they, you know, the follow up to the 296? Because think about it, because like right now they’re in the stages of, okay, what’s going to be coming after the 296? What are they going to build? Because, you know, in product planning and everything like that, you know, you have your, you know, um, lifespan of a car, you know, depending on if they, you know, anywhere from 6, 7, 8 years.
You know, I don’t know how long they’re going to have that, the 296 in the cycle, but you know, sometimes they have them very lengthy, sometimes they have them short. You know, so I’m going to be keeping the thing going for a long time. Now take a look at like the F12, which turned into the 812. I mean, basically almost the same, identical car, just a few tweaks and whatnot.
But you know, the, the, the basic premise is there. So they get a custom, hey, so call it the, uh, I don’t know if you go 312, call it the [00:10:00] 298, something, I don’t know. But I just think it would be awesome for them to come out and offer a manual gear. I see a lot of people are going back to want that analog experience.
Cause let’s be serious. Cars that are getting built today at that level. That price point, that performance, you’re not going to use nowhere near all the things that that car can do. You’re not even going to, those wheels will never see a track. You know, they might barely ever get over a hundred miles an hour.
I don’t, you know, I just, I don’t know. I mean, so why have a car that has all that performance, that capability? Oh, you can change gear and X amount of milliseconds. Oh, and this, that is going to shave 10 tenths off for this. Who’s going to do that? You know, the 1 percent of them, a lot of those guys, they’re buying the full fledged race car that their factory sells and taking them on the track.
So why do you, you know, why does it matter to road car? You want to have analog experience. You want to be part of it. That’s why you go into the [00:11:00] marketplace and you look and see what people are asking for factory manual Ferraris, be it. That’s so much three sixties, but four thirties, if you guys jump on the foreign marketplace.
com, check out the analytics we got going on. We have from the past four or five years, we plugged in and put the data up to look at the sales and see where the trends are. I was going to take a look at and see. My man Eric put a lot of time and effort into that. Kudos to my man. He is awesome. But take a look at the numbers and the sales figures.
It kind of gives you a market forecast and where it’s been and everything like that. Kind of gives you an idea. Check out the numbers on that and you’ll see. The price and demand for the factory manuals, especially the 430, has gone to the roof. 599, forget about it. Worldwide, 30 built. 20 for the U. S. Now I think they got a little greedy and some people think it’s a million dollar car But if you look at some of the most recent auction numbers, it is about six seven hundred thousand dollars [00:12:00] So I know there’s a dealer out there that they had one He was sitting on for a bit and he was looking close to 900 didn’t happen, you know So I obviously got those something out there to see what happens see if it sticks He was wants to know but he said that car for a bit Now you look at factory 430 manuals, uh, there’s a few that have been sitting out there for quite a while.
I’m going to pick out a couple. There’s a gentleman that’s over on the east coast. I’m not going to say his name, Ryan Freedman. Um, he’s had a few of these, and he’s got a hell of an inventory. Ryan’s a great guy. Super nice. Uh, but he’s had a couple now. There’s one he’s had. It’s blue, red interior. He bought it from a dealer out of Michigan.
I can’t remember the dealer’s name because it’s been a few months. It’s been a while. Um, that dealer had it at like 299, something like that. Carhead. 12, 000 miles, something like that. I have to go back and check. You know, mileage was decent. Anything crazy. Nice color combo. It’s pretty sick. I love the red interior with the blue.
It’s a great, great combo on it. So Ryan, you know, it [00:13:00] wasn’t for sale long in Detroit because he snagged it up and bought it for what I don’t know. But then he turned around and threw it up on his site for 320. So he was trying to do a flip. He snagged that thing. He was hoping. Now what’s interesting on that car, he had put it up on bring a trailer.
And I made a post on there in the question, you know, in the comment section about, about the fact is, Oh, well, hey, this is interesting that this car came from X in Detroit for this. It was for sale at this price. Ryan bought it and then put it up for this curious to see what goes on here. My post got removed for not being, what do they say, it’s, it’s um, it’s not, it’s not contributing in a positive way or something, I don’t know, something cheesy.
So I redid it again and reposted it, then it stayed up there, but it’s like really, come on, people with half a brain. We’ll know to do the research. All you gotta do is pull the VIN up, type that into Google search, and it’s gonna come up to where this car is at and everything like that. So, I mean, it ain’t rocket science, people.
You can’t be hiding this [00:14:00] stuff. So, didn’t sell on Bring a Trailer. I think it got up to 280, 270, something like that. I don’t even know it got that high. I’d have to go back and check. Um, here, tell you what. You know what? I got the computer right in front of me. Let’s go to Bring a Trailer. Let’s pull up 430s.
Come on, computer. Come on, computer. Uh, F430. Ferrari F430. Let’s see what we got going on real quick. Uh, let’s see here. Now let’s look at, where’s our auction results. Um, ba doom boom boom. Ba doom boom boom. Trying to remember how long ago it was in, um, give me a moment. Bear with me. It was a few months ago.
We’re back to, I don’t think it was that long ago, was it?
Is it even on here? I don’t know, do they do, no, they have the ones that are unsold and I’ll see we’re getting back into beginning of the year. Now where’d it [00:15:00] go? Where’d you go Mr. Blue Car? Mr. Blue? It wasn’t there, wasn’t there, no, no. We’ll get into Scuds too because that’s a whole, that’s another, it’s interesting to see when you get to like conversions too and see the prices on that.
So, um, Oh, I’m sorry. You know what? It wasn’t Ryan’s car. I apologize. It was actually the yellow one. So, you know, I was talking about that yellow one. There was, and I don’t see it anywhere. How’d it go?
I don’t know. Anyways, I don’t, I ain’t going to ditch going through it. So anyways, but it was Ryan’s car. We’re going back for it. So, and he’s been still sitting on it and looking at his inventory and he’s got a couple other ones. There seem to get a little more realistic, but there’s a black on black of which I love to have, um, that he’s got reasonably priced at two 80, something like that.
And it’s got, [00:16:00] um, I’m trying to remember the mileage on it. Um, let me see here.
Let’s see here, let’s go on, let’s see if he still has it. Let’s just check it out and see since we’re, since we’re talking about it. Let’s just go on to his website and say, what you got there Mr. Friedman? What you looking at? Inventory? Current inventory? Let’s go to your Ferraris. Let’s see what we got.
Maybe he sold it. I don’t know. But he’s got a black on black one. I just love to get my hands on. Um, here let’s just do the search. Make, we want Ferrari. He’s got 11. There we go. All right, got some got a 355 there’s an f1 tranny challenge to dolly Doom See he still has the blue one that one has 12, 000 484 miles He’s got a 289.
9. So he’s dropped it down. So I wonder how much he got it for from the Detroit guy. Um, then there’s a three 60 and then [00:17:00] here is the two feet. Oh, he’s dropped the price, but it’s got a little over 26, 000 miles on it. Uh, black on black. My love to have that car. So it’s getting down there. So people got it. I want to say greedy in regards to pricing and what have you, but like I said, go on the, the fire marketplace.
com check out the market trends and you’ll see, so They didn’t sell. And I know there was a couple out there. People think, Oh my God, half a mil not happening. People markets going to dictate, tell you what something’s worth. So these guys are sitting on these cars cause they’re getting a little out of hand.
Now, the interesting thing is three sixties. You know, you get yourself, you can still, you’re still in the mid 100 range, 140, 170, depending on mileage, whatnot, what have you, um, and get it, so, those are still very decent. Now, I’m going to do the next follow up to this is going to be, I’m going to compare the 360 and 430 because there’s, even though they look extremely similar, there’s some huge differences between them.
But anyways, so you can still do well with the 360 in regards to getting a factory manual 6 speed. So, [00:18:00] So here’s the thing, again, going with the price wise is on that. So a 360, you can pick one up for 80 grand. It’s got some, you know, maybe 20, 30, 000 miles on it, needs a service or anything like that. So if you’re going to go in there and do a manual swap, you might as well, you know, do your, uh, belts and everything like that as well.
So, but say you got 40 grand for the kit, put it in there. I mean, you could still be at the price. So why don’t you just spend a few extra dollars to get yourself factory manual, just the financial and the numbers don’t make sense. So anyways, Should Ferrari build another one? Factory with a new car? Yes, they should.
It’s my opinion that I think they would sell like hotcakes. You know? So again, it kind of sucks is, okay, is it going to be an Icona series where it’s a limited edition and you got to be on the list? You got to be the in, you know, you’ve had to had yourself 500 Ferraris before, you know, you got to own yourself, you know, the new F80, you got to own a lot of Ferrari and Enzo, you got to, I mean, you know, I didn’t, you know, some of these stipulations, well, if you, if you buy yourself an SF90, we’ll sell you this, you know, kind of that deal so they can move them because no one’s buying SF90s.[00:19:00]
Um, you know, so it’s, so. Where do they drop it? You would hope they would drop it. So it would be a production car that, I mean, even a production car, they’re only building a few thousand a year of them. So it’s not like you’re building tens of thousands of them. So it’s still technically limb car. It would sound like crazy.
Could you imagine what the resale, the flip market would be? Oh my Lord. People would be making bank on those cars, but I just think it would be so cool for them to go back. Go to their roots, man. Build a factory manual. It’d be awesome to see the 296. I mean, obviously twin 36, but you know, it wouldn’t be that much of an engineering exercise to do it.
And I guarantee you’ll be leading the way in the marketplace. You want to talk about Lamborghini jumping on board. They did do that in a heartbeat. And you talk about, you know, their V12 just glorious sounding with the manual, everything. Uh, put a good tiny exhaust on there. Lord have mercy. [00:20:00] You’d be singing to the gods with that’s my son.
So yes, they should do it again. Now, what do they put in it? Then here’s a question. Do you do it into, drop it into a VTOL? Because here’s the other problem you have. You got all these emission standards. You have all this stuff. So it’s like, oh, maybe you make it a track only car. Well, that would suck. Um, you know, you could go into the fact is you make it.
Barely a track only car, but you put all the stuff in there to turn it into a road legal car. You just have someone on the outside do it. So basically have all the wiring for all your stuff, you know that you need to transform it back into a road legal car. You know, there’s those entities that will do that.
There’s the, what you would call, they do that with the, uh, McLaren F1s. You know, they’ve done some very, you know, racy, racy cars with those and made them. street legal, and so it’s not out of the realm, so it would be cool for them to do. So, [00:21:00] you know, there’s a way to flirt with everything and kind of get these things back to where it would need to be a road legal car.
Excuse me, so I don’t think it’d be all that difficult. But, again, you would almost have to go the route of having a twin turbo model, be it a V8 or a V6. Now, yeah, you could do the V12. Yeah, that’s true. So, but, again, for the emissions and all that stuff, they gotta meet all the stringent requirements, all that jazz.
You know, you gotta do this to the motor, so you couldn’t have an NA V12, V8, or V6, or anything like that. It’s gonna have to be twin turbocharged and do it. But I mean, you can still make it sound good. So, you know, you have all that to deal with. But I still think it would be so worth it. And I’m going to tell you right now, Ferrari, you would sell them out in a heartbeat.
You want to talk about just getting back to the core. You want to talk about not only taking care of your loyal supporters, followers, and clients, [00:22:00] customers, man, you’d probably gain Crap load more, you know, you’d get a lot of people over from the dark side of the raging bull and get them over to the prancing horse Because you went back to hey, what let’s let’s do something like that Let’s let’s go back to let’s go back to building something that the clients would just absolutely go nuts for I mean that would just and could you imagine with what they have what you have at your you know, your Your arsenal what you have that you could get into in regards to Put putting this together.
It would be awesome what you could do with this car You know what and get rid of all no, you don’t need to have you know You know don’t need the the screen in there. You don’t need to have GPS. You need all that garbage Scrap that go back analog. Yeah, you still have all your computer stuff You need to really enhance it and all that jazz, but get rid of all that crap No one gives a shit about it.
No one wants it. And a [00:23:00] lot of the times it runs like crap. Go back to make a nice bass. Balls out fun, just analog Ferrari that you can just go out and enjoy. You got your three things in front of you. You got your speedo. You got your RPM gauge. So you know if you’re going to run out of gas or not, you know, if you want to put a couple of other ones in there, fine.
So be it, put a couple of your smaller ones for your voltage and all that crap. But just get your big dot, two big dolls in front of you. Have your basic, I mean, you don’t even need a radio, but you know what people are going to want that. So put in a decent radio, your air con, that kind of stuff. But forget having that big fricking screen and touch buttons and all that crap.
You know, just have it nice and basic. Have it on your, know what you got on your steering wheel? A horn button. That’s it. That’s all you need. Horn. That’s all you need. You don’t need the magneto and do all that crap to go and raise, blah, blah, blah. All that stuff. No. All you need is [00:24:00] your three pedals, your steering wheel, your couple of circle gauges, and that big metal stick sticking up out between your, uh, right next to your right hand.
Nice ball in there. Bam, bam, bam, bam. Going through the gates. You want to talk about selling those like, you could probably build a hundred thousand of them. You’d sell them in a heartbeat at 250, 000 a piece. Cost you a hundred grand to build them or whatever. You make a bank. I mean, it’s just an exercise in engineering.
I think Ferrari needs to go back to, I think it would just be phenomenal. It’d be so cool to see that happen just to go back to just doing something like that. It would just be so cool to see. I mean, again, obviously you got to have your safety features, got to have airbags, got to have those stuff, dah, dah, dah.
So, but just whatever the bare minimum is to pass all the regulations that you need. Cause let’s face it, you’re basically building the past the regulations United States because the United States sucks. in regards to what regulations you got to meet because you meet their U. S. regulations, that thing’s going to pass everywhere else.
Just plain and [00:25:00] simple. So bare minimum, meet what you got to meet. Put in a six speed manual. Yes, you could do a seven, but it just looks too funky. Having that extra thing over there. All you need is a six speed. You’re finding good with that. Cause I said, that is more than enough for 99. 9 percent of the people that are going to buy it and drive it.
They’re going to talk about going to the tail of the dragon, going to those places with that, just hearing that thing sing. Um, I mean, it’d just be unbelievable what you could do with that car. Man, that’d be fantastic. So tell me your thoughts message. Shoot me an email. William at the far part for William at the Ferrari marketplace.
com. Shoot me an email. Let me know what your thoughts are. Put some comments down in the comments below. Share this around. Tell me what you think. I did a poll on LinkedIn a while back and yes, basically 99 percent of the people said yes, of course you had these youngsters. Nah, flap your paddle. There you go.
Cause they don’t know how to dry stick. That’s the problem. They didn’t learn. I learned my first car was a stick when I drove on the road. [00:26:00] Cause I learned how to drive a lot earlier than that, you know, started riding motorcycles when I was five, four. So I guarantee a lot of these listeners, majority of your listeners, your first car was a manual.
You probably have a manual car in your garage right now. So, comment on this. Shoot me an email. Let me know what you think. We should have a roundtable discussion on this. I think it’d be really cool. Mr. Eric, I think we should maybe set this up on BreakFix and have a little roundtable discussion. I think that’d be fun.
So anyways guys, that’s about all I have on this episode today. Let me know your thoughts on this. Again, I appreciate you listening. Check out, get on over to Motoring Podcast Network, check out what else we got going on on the MPN. There’s a lot of cool stuff you guys can listen to. So don’t miss out on that.
So till next time guys, appreciate it. Have a good one.
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