The Dutch-British firm Niels van Roij Design is responsible for a number of impressive one-off and small-series vehicles, including a Tesla Model S shooting brake, the Carat Duchatelet Rolls-Royce Wraith shooting brake, and of course, the two-door Range Rover known as the Adventum Coupe. Still, the most impressive so far has to be this, the strictly one-off Niels van Roij Design Breadvan Hommage. First sketched by the Dutch designer sometime in 2018, it was hand-hammered into shape by renowned builder Bas van Roomen, using a donor Ferrari 550 Maranello coupé equipped with a six-speed manual transmission.
Building an hommage to the 1962 original using a front-engine V12 was the right call. Not only did the 250 GT use the same recipe, but the 550 Maranello itself also became a proper racing machine thanks to companies like Italtecnica, Baumgartner Sportwagen Technik, and most famously, Prodrive in England. Now, ready for 2021, we get the new Breadvan penned by Niels van Roij, who had the difficult task of implementing all the rather weird design features of the original Drogo-bodied prototype onto a Ferrari from the nineties designed by Pininfarina. The Dutchman went all in, and the result is impressive, to say the least.
While it’s getting more and more difficult to get excited about Ferrari’s more recent flood of one-off V12s, whoever commissioned this Breadvan Hommage won’t be bored with this completely-transformed 550. Yet before we’d get into the details, here’s what the 1962 Ferrari 250 GT SWB Breadvan is all about:
The “Palace Revolution” at Ferrari was when engineering masterminds Carlo Chiti and Giotto Bizzarrini, as well as a number of other high-profile employees, broke ties with the famously difficult Enzo Ferrari in 1961, only to establish ATS and continue racing against Scuderia Ferrari with the financial backing of Giovanni Volpi, head of Scuderia Serenissima. When Ferrari refused to sell the new 250 GTO to Count Volpi due to his involvement with his former crew, Bizzarrini and Volpi came up with a new idea against Enzo’s GTOs, which turned an outdated 1962 250 GT SWB into a lightweight monster with a longer nose and an aerodynamic shooting brake rear featuring a Kamm-tail, hand-built by body specialist Piero Drogo.
Successful in period and once painted silver, the car has been restored a number of times since and remains in an excellent race-ready condition to this day. Thanks to that, I’m lucky enough to have seen this car race at Goodwood more than once, and as it turns out, Niels van Roij Design’s customer also witnessed the miracle that is the Breadvan there, just as it was doing its best against a Jaguar E-Type. Then, an idea was born.
