► One-off custom coachbuilt special
► Bodywork by Panther cars in England
► On display after extensive restoration
Back in the early 1970s, an American property developer named Bob Gittleman with deep pockets and unusual taste in estate cars wandered into Luigi Chinetti’s New York Ferrari dealership and asked for ‘something a bit different.’ And so it was that a Rosso Dino red Ferrari 365 GTB/4 ‘Daytona’ coupe found itself shipped to Panther Westwinds in Surrey (the same automotive company that would go on to produce the crazy six-wheeled Panther 6 convertible) to be converted into the first – and only – Daytona Shooting Brake.
The rather spectacular-looking creation pictured here was the result, and after an in-depth restoration the 4.4-litre V12-powered wonder-wagon resurfaced at the Salon Privé concours event at Blenheim Palace over the weekend.
Not an estate to carry the dog in
A plain old tailgate simply wouldn’t do for a car like this, and Panther instead fashioned gullwing-hinged side windows to grant access to the boot. Not ideal for loading flatpack furniture, perhaps, but all the better to create that striking trapezoidal glass tail. You probably wouldn’t want to put anything more solid than a coat in the boot anyway, for fear of damaging that beautiful wooden decking. There’s more of the same in the dashboard, completely different from that of a typical Daytona with centrally stacked instruments.
By the time the Shooting Brake was shipped back to Gittleman’s Florida base in 1975 it had cost the equivalent of four regular Daytonas. It’s passed through a few owners since, in both the United States and France, but still has fewer than 4000 miles on the clock. The Shooting Brake is currently being offered for sale by London classic car dealer Hexagon Classics. How much? File that one under ‘if you have to ask…’, but with values for ‘ordinary’ Daytonas easily climbing past three quarters of a million pounds, don’t be surprised to see this one-off special top six figures.