Most “new arrivals” in this space are cars you could, in theory, order. The CZ26 isn’t one of them. Unveiled in August at Monterey Car Week, it’s a genuine one-off, a single car, built for a single American client, that will never see a second example. Ferrari calls this its Special Projects program, and the CZ26 is the latest and one of the most dramatic results of it.
What it actually is
Underneath the completely bespoke bodywork, the CZ26 is mechanically an SF90 Stradale. That means the same twin-turbo 4.0-liter V8 producing 797 cv (roughly 786 hp), paired with electric motors adding another 162 kW and drawing from a 7.9-kWh battery, the same plug-in hybrid setup that makes the SF90 one of the quickest cars Ferrari has ever built. None of the mechanical package changed. Everything you’re looking at on the outside did.
Designed by the Ferrari Design Studio under Flavio Manzoni, the CZ26 trades the SF90’s flowing lines for a distinctly two-box silhouette, a shape more associated with 1970s Italian industrial design than with a modern supercar. The body is finished in an exclusive Argento Veloce silver with Rosso Lampante red accents and pigmented carbon-fiber components. A full-width front grille houses ultra-slim, concealed-effect lighting, and the entire cooling system was redesigned around it, with repositioned radiators, dedicated bypass ducts, and air curtains to manage the turbulence coming off the front wheels. The sides still carry the SF90’s basic greenhouse and proportions, but the rear closes out in a clean, truncated tail with a small ducktail spoiler and taillights that echo the current 12Cilindri, a deliberate link back to Ferrari’s present design language even inside a car built to look like nothing else in the current lineup.
Who actually gets one of these
Ferrari doesn’t publish pricing for Special Projects commissions, and it doesn’t need to. These cars aren’t sold in any conventional sense. A client with an existing, established relationship with Maranello, typically someone with a serious personal collection and a track record with the brand, works directly with Ferrari’s design and engineering teams to develop something entirely their own. The SF90 Stradale underneath starts at roughly half a million dollars before options; whatever the CZ26’s client paid for this level of bespoke development sits well beyond that, in territory Ferrari simply doesn’t discuss publicly.
This isn’t a limited run like the Revuelto SV’s 1,963 units, and it isn’t a paid options package like the Carrera S’s return of the manual gearbox. It’s a program with room for exactly one buyer per car, and the CZ26 is proof Ferrari will still build something this strange, this specific, for the right client.
Why a car nobody else can own still matters
It would be easy to dismiss a one-off as irrelevant to anyone who isn’t the person who commissioned it, but that misses what Special Projects cars actually do for Ferrari, and for anyone paying attention to the brand. These commissions are where Ferrari’s design studio gets to work without the constraints of a production run, a global dealer network, or a five-year model cycle. Ideas that show up here sometimes echo forward into future production cars; ideas that don’t still tell you something about where the design language is headed. The CZ26’s two-box shape and retro-futuristic details aren’t going into next year’s showroom lineup, but the taillights borrowed from the 12Cilindri, and the aggressive aero worked out to cool a heavily reshaped body, are the kind of details that make Special Projects cars worth watching even if you’ll only ever see this particular one in photos.