Only 35 Ferrari 348 Serie Speciale tb Berlinettas were produced globally in the early 1990s. Now, one Miami classic car dealer has two of them up for sale and if you want to buy both, you’d better be prepared to Venmo a cool $450,000 to The Barn Miami.
Discerning shop owner Gaston Rossato personally owned both cars, albeit accidentally. He had been looking for a 348 Speciale and while he was solidifying a deal on one, a second came up for sale. “Two offers were made simultaneously, and both were accepted,” Rossato tells Jalopnik. “So I ended up with two cars.” One is a rare blue, the other is finished in classic Ferrari red.
Rossato would love to keep both, but the spatial requirements of this physical world, and his business, work against holding on to two appreciating assets for too long. “I find joy in finding new ownership, a new caretaker, for a car, and in being part of the process,” he says.
The 348 Speciale is interesting not only because of its rarity — in addition to the 35 closed-roof “tb” models, 65 targa-topped “ts” spiders were produced, all of them solely for the North American market. It also launched the Serie Speciale cars, which are limited-edition vehicles that arrive at the end of a nameplate’s run (e.g. 458 Speciale, 488 Pista, etc.). These extended the lifespan slightly with model-specific performance upgrades to the powertrain, suspension, exhaust, and bodywork.
To this end, the 348 Speciale hosted an additional 12 horsepower from its 3.4-liter V8 engine, a freer-flowing exhaust system, a shortened final drive ratio, a two-inch-wider track, custom Pirelli P Zero tires, body-colored front and rear splitters and side skirts. There is also an asymmetrical air intake and a rear grille-cover delete, which gave the car’s a “naked” look, according to Ferrari. Scandalous!
It was also available with optional Kevlar-backed leather seats that were similar to those used in the F40 supercar. Both of Rossato’s Speciales feature these special buckets. The ones on the 19,664-mile blu sera car, the only azure-colored vehicle in the entire run, are caramel leather; while the 36,827-mile red car’s are ivory.
Though vehicles of the 1990s and 2000s are raging up-and-comers in the collectible car market, 348s remain the nadir of vintage Ferraris. “Unfortunately the 348 was kind of rushed to market, so there were a number of things on the car that probably were not ‘Ferrari’ enough,” says Jim Weed, editor of the Ferrari Market Letter, a five-decade old, bi-monthly valuation and information resource on the marque.
“Enzo had passed away in ’89, so this was kind of the first – I don’t want to say ‘non-Ferrari’ – but the first true Fiat-built car,” Weed says, referring to the mainstream brand’s takeover of the Italian company. Because of that, it had some parts bin features like cheap, sticky plastic interior buttons and switches that, according to Weed, make it feel a bit “cheesy.”
All of this kept prices relatively low, for a modern Ferrari. Nice, well-maintained 348s run in the $75,000 to $85,000 range, according to Weed. Speciales can easily double that, going for $150,000 to $175,000. According to the vintage vehicle valuation experts at Hagerty, Berlinetta (tb) cars outprice Spyder (ts) cars by about 15%. Setting the bar, a 24,000-mile tb Speciale with the Kevlar seats sold for $188,000 on Bring a Trailer last year.
Priced at $200,000 for the red tb and $250,000 for the rarer blue tb, Rossato’s cars may be a bit ahead of the price curve, or perhaps not. It’s been a year since that nearly $200,000 sale at BaT, and The Barn’s cars are nicely and rarely spec’d, have low mileage and, in these rising tides, all boats have been buoyed.
“By creating offshoots of the original car, regardless of what the model is, Ferrari helped fuel that desire,” says Weed. He notes that on the rare occasion when these Speciale models come up for sale publicly, they often set a new bar that, “will purposely drag a standard” 348 up in value. “That does tend to help,” he says, “even in future sales of the used regular series cars.”