Ferrari 365 GTB/4 Daytona NART Spider

The odd ones out

Without Luigi Chinetti, born in 1901 and three-time Le Mans winner (1932, 1934, 1949), Ferrari would probably not be what it is today. The Italian, who became a naturalised American citizen in 1946, was the first Ferrari dealer in North America from 1949 onwards – and in some years he sold half of Maranello’s annual production. There are many wonderful stories about and involving Luigi, and we will tell a few of them at some point, but first we want to talk about a car that did not exactly bring Chinetti glory: the Ferrari 365 GTB/4 Daytona NART Spider with a body by Michelotti.

What exactly drove Chinetti to have five GTB/4s decapitated and converted into Michelotti Spiders is anyone’s guess. It was probably the wedge shape, seen in its most beautiful form in the 1971 Lamborghini Countach – Ferrari had nothing to counter this, so one can imagine that Chinetti wanted something similar. He couldn’t turn to Gandini, and Giugiaro wasn’t available either, but Chinetti had already worked with Giovanni Michelotti in the late 1960s (and the 275 P2 that was created at that time was not the most beautiful Ferrari of all time). Michelotti drew a continuous line, somewhat shark-like at the front and more like a blue whale at the rear, as if he had suddenly run out of ideas.

The first car Luigi Chinetti sent to Michelotti was a 1971 Daytona, #14299, which he had first sold to a Dr Silva, taken back in the mid-1970s, sent across the pond to Turin in 1976, and received back in 1977 after being rebuilt. He gave the car to his wife Marion, who didn’t seem to like it very much, so it went back to Michelotti as an exhibit, sat in the Le Mans museum until its tyres went flat – and was sold off by Chinetti to dealer Marty Yacobian after his wife’s death. The next prominent owner was Jon Shirley, who looked after ‘Marion’ for 22 years; In February 2026, the first Ferrari 365 GTB/4 Daytona NART Spider will go under the hammer at RM Sotheby’s in Palm Beach, with an expected price of $600,000 to $750,000.

As mentioned, there were five of these Michelotti Spiders: in addition to #14299, there were #14897, #15003, #15965 (racing car for Le Mans 1975…) and #16467 (written off at least twice). More Ferraris can be found in the archive.