As a schoolboy in Tuscany, Luca Mazzanti dreamed of one day building his own supercar. Unlike most, however, he has held on to that dream and made it come true.
Now 37, he has been working for nearly 20 years with master coachbuilder Mario Faralli on restoring such rarities as a Cisitalia 202, a Ferrari 500 Mondial and even “Il Mostro” (The Monster), the one-off Maserati 450 Costin/Zagato driven by Stirling Moss in the 1957 Le Mans 24 Hours.
Then, in 2001, he and Faralli designed and built a brand-new barchetta (that's the Italian name for a roadster) for a client, leading to the formation of F&M Auto, which builds personal project cars for very rich Italians.
Now Faralli and Mazzanti are ready to build their own, very exclusive supercar, the result of three years of collaboration with designer Zsolt Tarnok. Only five will be made, each hand-built to customer spec and seriously, if you have to ask the price, you can't afford one.
The car was originally to have been called the Mugello, but the prototype you see in these pictures (which is a runner, by the way) carries the name Evantra, possibly after objections from the owner of the famous racing circuit, which just happens to be Ferrari.
Each Evantra will have a mid-mounted 3.5-litre flat-six engine; customers can choose between a 300kW naturally-aspirated model and an awe-inspiring 445kW twin-turbo version.
The bodies will be hand-crafted in either carbon fibre or aluminium; while the composite structure is lighter, specifying aluminium will allow the customer to introduce small styling changes to suit their vision of the ultimate one-off supercar - each panel is hand-rolled, you see, rather than punched out in a die like a production car.
The partners say that, with the twin-turbo engine in a carbon-fibre body and no extras, the Evantra will weigh only 1200kg and sprint from 0-100km/h in 3.7 seconds.