Picture yourself in 1960s Manhattan driving your new, one-off Ferrari, which is the brand’s first and only roadgoing car with a mid-engine V-12. Next, dismiss the race-winning engineering, ignore the custom coachwork by Sergio Pininfarina, and complain. It’s too hard to parallel park. And where’s the damn air conditioning?
That’s how the first owner of this 1966 Ferrari 365P Berlinetta Speciale—nicknamed “Tre Posti” for its driver-centered, three-passenger cabin—felt after plunking down $26,000 in August 1967. Months later, the New York investment banker returned it to Ferrari’s first U.S. importer, Luigi Chinetti, and bought an air-conditioned 365GT 2+2.
When it goes up for auction next month at Pebble Beach, the Tre Posti is expected to fetch more (perhaps a lot more) than $16 million as one of the rarest, most important Ferraris ever made. Even by Ferrari auction standards, that’s a tough bar to meet.
At first glance, the 365P looks like a widened and stretched 1967 Dino 206GT, Ferrari’s first mid-engine production car. But under the impossibly long tail hid a 4.4-liter, three-carb V-12 and all the internal organs of Chinetti’s 365P2 race car campaigned by his North American Racing Team, known as NART. It was barely street-legal, with an integrated chrome roll cage, competition pedals, and a gas tank that Chinetti modified so the car’s driver wouldn’t have to drag the fuel nozzle inside the leather cockpit. NART badges with American flags were fastened to an otherwise oily-smooth white body.
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The Tre Posti was Sergio Pininfarina’s pet project and enjoyed a yearlong world tour to major auto shows right as Lamborghini unveiled its own mid-engine V-12 supercar, the Miura. Enzo Ferrari felt that the 380-hp mid-engine V-12 would be “too dangerous” for the road, and in one of his few mistakes, Il Commendatore never greenlighted the 365P, even as a two-seater. By the time Ferrari introduced its first mid-engine V-12, the 365GT4 Berlinetta Boxer of 1973, Lamborghini had built hundreds of Miuras—no doubt prettier than the Tre Posti—and forged its own reputation for world-beating supercars. Chinetti’s son, Luigi, Jr., said to auction house Gooding & Company that “had Ferrari built it, nobody would ever have given a second thought to the Miura.”
Instead, as the Ferrari hypercar of its era, this Tre Posti, following its 1966–1967 world tour, spent very little time with its unappreciative first private owner before he returned it to the Chinettis. It then briefly found another home—or rather, homes—with a Dutch playboy and the granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller. In 1969, the car came back to Chinetti and remained in the family ever since, peeking out only occasionally at Goodwood and a few concours. Ferrari built a second car for Fiat president Gianni Agnelli that is now part of a private collection. No others exist.
With only 4950 miles and no seat belts, the Tre Posti is a remarkable preservation of when Ferrari sold road cars merely to finance its racing teams. And perhaps it was best that the Tre Posti was never built as a series production car. When it debuted, Road & Track drew a cartoon showing both of this car’s doors open, a man in the central driver’s seat, and two women fighting on the Italian roadside. Whoever has the cash can put that scenario to real use.
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