Would you like to own a unique, brand-new Ferrari concept car?
Yes. Yes, I very much would
OK, ummm, we're not sure how to ask this next bit. Does it matter... to you... if the car... the Ferrari... is not... exactly... legally speaking... er... physical?
Exsqueeze me? Baking powder?
Yeah, you see this is Ferrari getting into the realms of NFTs, or Non Fungible Tokens - unique digital creations that are protected and potentially valuable in the future. You can think of this as the crypto-car.
What exactly is it?
It's the Ferrari F76, a digital concept car that's been designed to celebrate 76 years of Ferrari wins at Le Mans.
The stunning 499P race car this year scored its hat trick of Le Mans wins, taking three in a row for the Scuderia. Some 76 years ago, in 1949, Ferrari scored its first Le Mans win when Lord Selsdon and legendary US Ferrari importers Luigi Chinetti drove their Ferrari 166 MM barchetta to victory.
So what's the crypto car?
Dubbed the F76, and created by Ferrari designer Flávio Manzoni and his team, it's a "design manifesto” which "sets out to redefine the boundaries of automotive design through a parametric approach where form, function and performance merge as a single organism.”
What does that mean in language humans speak?
It means it's a purely digital creation (although of course there's nothing to stop Ferrari creating some kind of a physical version or model in the future) which picks up some of the design cues of the recent Ferrari F80 and Testarossa and adds them to a wild twin-boom layout in which the driver and passenger are separated into two different sections of the bodywork - like the Italdesign Aztec or the Alpine Silver Fox.
Unlike those cars, the F76 actually has two full sets of controls and, thanks to drive-by-wire tech, one set of controls can transmit the same set of sensations and feedback to the other, so in theory one person could drive while the other feels what they're doing through their wheel and pedals.
The twin-boom layout, says Ferrari, allows for a unique exploitation of aerodynamics. Well, it would if there were actually any air in cyberspace...
Yeah, walk me through that again
OK, so the F76 doesn't exist in real life, but instead as a series of digital creations, each one unique and theoretically tradeable, just like Bitcoin or other forms of crypto currency.
Over the three years that the F76 has been in development, Ferrari's customer for the NFT project has been able to customise their own individual NFT.
Is there a serious car in there?
Well, no in the sense that Ferrari isn't going to build this as a real car. But yes, in the sense that Ferrari has been able to design a new concept car right up to the point where you'd actually go and build it, but it's got its customer to essentially pay for the design process.
Presumably, that effort won't go to waste. As well as the aero cleverness going on, Ferrari has said that the F76 allows the design team to explore "revolutionised interior spaces and volumes, with technologies that combine traditional functionality requirements with innovative geometries produced by the generative method.”