Ferrari 599: The Last Ferrari With a Gear Lever
In 2012 a chassis numbered 187007 left Maranello. A 599 GTB Fiorano with a six-speed manual and an aluminum gate.
It was the last Ferrari that would ever be built with a shift lever. Ferrari said nothing. No announcement, no press release, no internal video. Out the factory door and on to the next thing.
Thirteen years later that car sells for three to four times what an identical one with paddles brings. The company did not understand what it was burying. The market did.
Twenty of the thirty came here
Start with the number that matters to American buyers, because this is a story that largely played out on this side of the Atlantic.
Of roughly 3,500 to 4,000 599 GTBs built, depending on which source you trust, only 30 left the factory with the six-speed manual. Twenty of those came to the United States. Ten stayed in Europe.
To see the scale of the collapse, look at the whole arc. The 550 Maranello was built entirely with the manual, no exceptions. The 575M Maranello managed only 246 manuals, plus 43 manual 575 Superamericas. The 599 got 30.
Fifteen years exactly from the F1 paddle gearbox debuting on the 1997 F355 to the lever disappearing from the catalog. The technology that car introduced as a cutting-edge option consumed the mechanism it replaced, and customers did the pushing: every generation of the F1 gearbox was quicker and easier, and buyers stopped asking for three pedals.
Ferrari drew the obvious conclusion and deleted the manual from the next generation, the F12berlinetta.
Then the market turned. According to Hagerty’s valuation tool, a standard 599 GTB with the F1 transmission trades between $180,000 and $200,000. An identical car with the manual runs $700,000 to $900,000. A 2007 599 GTB sold at Amelia Island in 2023 for $830,000.
Three to four times the money for an aluminum gate.
One warning, because the business already exists: an F1-equipped 599 can be converted to a manual, and those cars can be found under $200,000. They carry neither the value nor the collector interest of a factory car. In this market, factory documentation is the whole ballgame.
What 599 GTB Fiorano actually means
The name explains the car and breaks the pattern again. The 599 is the V12’s displacement divided by ten, 5,999 cc. GTB is Gran Turismo Berlinetta, a nod to the company’s most famous berlinettas. Fiorano is the circuit Ferrari uses to develop its road and race cars.
That is the fifth naming system in this series of articles. The Daytona was a 365 GTB/4 for the displacement of one cylinder. The 512 BB used liters plus cylinder count. The F355 mixed liters and valves. The 360 went back to total capacity and added a city. The 599 uses total capacity divided by ten and adds a racetrack.
The Enzo’s engine, turned down
Under the hood sits the Tipo F140 C, a 5,999 cc V12 making 620 PS between 7,600 and 8,400 rpm, with 608 Nm at 5,600 and a redline at 8,400. At launch it was the most powerful production Ferrari ever built.
The block comes from the Enzo, where it made 651 hp. Ferrari turned it down for the 599, because this was the company’s grand tourer, successor to the 575M Maranello, built to cross a continent with two people and luggage. Four seats meant the 612 Scaglietti.
The numbers are 3.7 seconds to 60 mph and a top speed above 205 mph. And here is a detail the brochures skip: the 599 completed Ferrari’s switch to aluminum across the whole range. The 575 was the last steel-chassis Ferrari, so this car closes the transition the 360 Modena started.
The buttresses started as a doodle
The arches flanking the rear window, the flying buttresses, are the 599’s visual signature. They channel air around the rear of the car and remove the need for a wing. Exterior design was by Jason Castriota under Pininfarina.
They did not begin as an aerodynamic solution. They started as a styling exercise by Castriota. Only afterward did Ferrari aerodynamicist Luca Caldirola prove in the wind tunnel that the shape actually worked.
The combination of optimized underbody, rear diffuser and buttresses produces roughly 160 kg of downforce at 300 km/h with a drag coefficient of 0.336. Treat that downforce figure carefully: Ferrari’s own material gives 160 kg at 300 km/h while at least one specialist publication cites around 419 pounds at top speed. I am using the factory number and noting the discrepancy.
Two world firsts, one of them built in Michigan
The 599 introduced two systems that are now standard on every expensive performance car, and both deserve explaining because the marketing left them as acronyms.
The first is SCM, magnetorheological suspension control. The dampers contain a fluid whose viscosity changes when an electronically controlled magnetic field is applied. In practice the damper firms up or softens in milliseconds, with no mechanical valving to move, and it reacts instantly compared with a conventional hydraulic system.
Ferrari developed it with Delphi, the American supplier that had provided a similar system for the 2003 Chevrolet Corvette and several later General Motors cars. Another American technical heart inside an Italian car, exactly like the Alcoa chassis in the 360 Modena covered earlier in this series.
The second is F1-Trac, predictive traction control. Instead of cutting power once the wheel is already spinning, it anticipates available grip and manages torque before traction is lost. Ferrari put the gain at 20 percent more acceleration out of a corner compared with a conventional system.
Both are governed by the manettino on the steering wheel, and the 599 was the first Ferrari V12 to have one.
HGTE, the box you needed to tick
In 2009 Ferrari showed the HGTE package at Geneva, standing for Handling Gran Turismo Evoluzione. Firmer suspension, shorter springs, stiffer anti-roll bars.
It is the equipment separating a good car from an excellent one today, and it appears on essentially every later special version. The final manual, chassis 187007, had it.
599 GTO, the third time Ferrari used those letters
The 599 GTO appeared at the Beijing Motor Show in 2010. Only the third time in history Maranello had put those three letters on a car, after the 250 GTO and the 288 GTO.
The V12 went to 670 hp and weight came down to around 3,296 pounds after a serious reduction program. That produced 3.35 seconds to 62 mph and a top speed above 208 mph. It lapped Fiorano in 1:24.0, making it the fastest road-going Ferrari around that circuit at the time.
Ferrari built 599 of them, playing on the model name.
Among the technology inherited from the track program are the F1-derived wheel doughnuts, which do two jobs at once: cutting turbulence and therefore drag, and improving brake cooling.
599XX, the car that beat Niki Lauda
This is the strangest chapter in the family and the one that gets told worst.
The 599XX is an extreme berlinetta built for the track without competition homologation. It is not road legal and it cannot race in any official category. It is a rolling laboratory Ferrari placed in the hands of its closest clients.
Output climbs to 730 PS with the limiter raised to 9,000 rpm, and a revised shift strategy cuts changes to 60 milliseconds. It introduced the Actiflow system, which increases downforce or reduces drag depending on the car’s attitude through a corner, and with it downforce reaches 630 kg at 300 km/h. Nearly four times the road car’s figure.
On April 21, 2010, Ferrari test driver Raffaele de Simone lapped the full 20.832 km Nordschleife in 6 minutes 58.16 seconds. It was the first production-derived sports car to break seven minutes there, improving on the 6:58.5 set by Germany’s Florian Gruber in another 599XX.
Now the part that rarely makes the coverage. That time is quicker than the 6 minutes 58.6 seconds Niki Lauda recorded in 1975 in a Ferrari 312T Formula 1 car, which stood as the best lap ever set by an F1 machine on the Nordschleife.
A front-engined GT derived from a road car beat the best Formula 1 time at the Green Hell, thirty-five years later.
And now the asterisks, because there are enough of them to erase the achievement. The 599XX is not road legal. It ran on slicks. And the Radical SR8 LM had already gone around in 6 minutes 48 seconds the previous summer, which is why Ferrari had to frame its result as a record for production-derived sports cars, a category shaped precisely to fit the result.
That is the 599 in one sentence: a car capable of something historic that its own maker had to wrap in conditions until the edge was gone.
SA Aperta, eighty cars for two surnames
The SA Aperta arrived at the Paris show in 2010, the only official open 599. Ferrari built 80 to mark Pininfarina’s 80th anniversary, and the SA initials belong to Sergio and Andrea Pininfarina, son and grandson of founder Battista Pinin Farina.
Andrea Pininfarina had died in 2008 in a scooter accident in Italy.
It uses the GTO’s 670 hp engine. The windscreen is more steeply raked than the 599 GTB’s, the front bumper ducts are larger, the boot lid is aluminum and the C-pillars are carbon fiber with a silver finish. The exhaust is a modified version of the 599XX system. The roof is a light soft top intended only for genuinely bad weather.
All 80 sold before the car was shown publicly.
The gold Ferrari that came out of a Fellini film
Here is the strangest angle of all, and it is entirely real.
Edward Walson, son of John Walson, the inventor of cable television, approached Ferrari in 2008 with a commission. He had seen a film featuring a gold Ferrari bodied by Fantuzzi, and he wanted a modern reinterpretation of it.
The film is the short Federico Fellini directed in 1968, Toby Dammit, one of three episodes in Spirits of the Dead, itself based on an Edgar Allan Poe story. The car on screen was a Ferrari 330 connected to Luigi Chinetti, Ferrari’s US importer, who already appears in our 512 BB piece for pushing Maranello to take the Boxer to Le Mans. Sources disagree on whether it was a 330 LM or a 330 LMB, so I am leaving that open.
The result is the P540 Superfast Aperta, revealed on December 11, 2009, and the second car in Ferrari’s Special Projects program. Pininfarina designed it, Maranello built it, and Walson was involved at every stage. The whole project, from sketch to shakedown testing, took fourteen months.
The engineering deserves credit. Turning a coupe into a homologated, road-legal open car required stiffening the chassis using finite element analysis and carbon fiber, and the finished car weighs roughly 45 pounds more than a standard 599. The V12 is untouched.
It is gold. A gold Ferrari, commissioned by the son of the man who invented cable television, inspired by a 1968 Fellini short based on a Poe story.
The other oddities
Special Projects also produced the Superamerica 45, a one-off designed in-house at Ferrari for Peter Kalikow, a client of 45 years. That anniversary is the name.
In December 2011 Ferrari announced a special edition of the 599 GTB celebrating 60 years of Scuderia wins in Formula 1, built as 40 cars on the HGTE chassis. Ferrari’s first Grand Prix win came at Silverstone in 1951 with José Froilán González driving; sixty years later, at the same circuit in 2011, Fernando Alonso won the British Grand Prix for Ferrari. Some of the press dates this series to 2010 and calls it the Alonso Final Edition; auction documentation and the announcement timeline point to December 2011 with cars leaving the factory in 2012, so that is what I am using.
The verdict
The 599 is the car where Ferrari proved it does not always know what it is holding.
It buried the gear lever without a line of comment, and today those thirty cars are worth four times their sisters. It put a machine on track that beat the best Formula 1 lap of the Nordschleife and then had to invent a category to announce it without being corrected. And its most recognizable design feature entered the project as a styling whim that happened to work in the wind tunnel.
Three wins, and in all three cases the company was late to understand them.
The gear lever is the revealing one, because Ferrari did not get it wrong through carelessness. It got it wrong by listening to the customer. Buyers wanted paddles, the factory built paddles, and the factory was right about the order book. The trouble is that the 2011 order book knew nothing about what the 2025 buyer would want. When a company builds objects that will last fifty years, listening only to today’s customer is an elegant way of being wrong in the long run.
And now Maranello builds thousand-horsepower plug-in hybrids with names pulled out of the 1950s, while the market pays $830,000 for a naturally aspirated twelve-cylinder grand tourer with three pedals.
What is Ferrari building right now without realizing what it is worth?
Check you’re still alive.