London, England - We know there used to be a well-publicised Roll-Royce bakkie floating around the Australian Outback, but this is the first time we have heard of anybody doing a pick-up conversion on… a Ferrari 412!
This imaginative (or blasphemous, depending on your point of view) conversion was done by London Supercar Workshop owner Elo and his mechanic buddy Will Trickett for a new History Channel series entitled 'Ultimate Wheels'.
INCREASINGLY DECADENT
Sparked by the booming London housing market and its appetite for increasingly decadent home conversions, Elo and Trickett set about creating the ultimate upmarket builder's workhorse.
They started by taking an angle-grinder to the Italian collectable, one of the last of the 576 that were built between 1985 and 1989, removing 300mm of the roof and shifting everything forward to create a 915mm load bed.
Taking inspiration from luxury yachts they used teak to panel the rear bed after jacking up the rear suspension for extra load-carrying capability.
SO FAR, SO GOOD…
Under a teak hatch that forms part of the load-bed floor bed there's a bespoke sound system with a woofer bigger than the average skottel-braai (ideal for playing Vivaldi!) - and under that there's a custom-made four-barrelled exhaust system with a cable-operated valve system that changes the exhaust note from mild to wild at the flick of a switch.
Finished in a superb Maranello Rosso paint job, the whole thing, in fact would have been an intriguing combination of practical workhorse and accessible performance, with a sound track just as suitable for the Bishop's Avenue as for Wandsworth High Street (the dodgy end), but then…
OH, DEAR...
In our humble opinion, they abandoned all pretensions to class or taste by cutting a hole in the bonnet and putting a drag strip-style 'shaker' air intake on top of the jewel-like fuel-injected 250kW 4943cc V12 engine - that’s just tacky.
Watch ‘Ultimate Wheels’ on the History Channel on Thursdays at 9pm, English time.