Ferrari's Newest One-Off Took Two Years and Rewrote an SF90's Entire Shape
A New Body Over a Familiar Heart
Ferrari has unveiled the CZ26, its latest Special Projects one-off, at Monterey Car Week — timed to a milestone year in which Ferrari is the featured marque of the 75th Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance. Commissioned by a single US client and developed under Ferrari Design Studio director Flavio Manzoni, the CZ26 took roughly two years of back-and-forth between client and styling team to finish, and the result looks almost nothing like the SF90 Stradale it's built on.
That's the point of the Special Projects programme: it doesn't restyle a car, it re-engineers how the car reads. The CZ26 replaces the SF90's sharp, "samurai-slashed" headlights with slim, concealed-effect units and moves to an entirely new two-box silhouette, filtering the modern berlinetta through a deliberately 1970s Italian industrial-design lens. The changes aren't just visual — Ferrari reworked the underbody, added vortex generators and air curtains, and redesigned the diffuser, all in service of the new shape's aerodynamics rather than against them. Inside, black technical fabric meets 3D-printed seat inserts, Rosso Lampante detailing and an embroidered CZ26 logo, with gloss carbon fibre carrying metallic filaments alongside satin carbon and body-coloured trim. Mechanically, the CZ26 keeps the SF90's plug-in hybrid setup intact: a twin-turbo 4.0-litre V8 rated at 786 hp, paired with electric motors and a 7.9-kWh battery for a combined output that still gets it to 100 km/h in 2.5 seconds and on to 328 km/h.
Why Two Years Is the Actual Product
It's easy to read a one-off like the CZ26 as an exercise in exclusivity for its own sake, but the more useful way to understand it is as a measure of how much genuine design work a manufacturer's in-house studio will do for a single client who's willing to commit the time. Two years is long enough to argue over headlight geometry, iterate the underbody aerodynamics rather than bolt on a splitter, and get the interior detailing right rather than settling for a badge and a paint code. That's a materially different commitment than most special editions, where the design work is finished before the first buyer signs anything.
For the kind of GCC client who already owns multiple Ferraris and has exhausted what a standard configurator or even a Tailor Made programme spec sheet can offer, a Special Projects car is the natural next step — and Dubai has a genuine concentration of buyers in exactly that position. The CZ26 is a useful reference point for what that process actually involves: not a request form, but a genuine multi-year collaboration with Ferrari's own designers, at a level few manufacturers outside Maranello, Sant'Agata and Crewe attempt at all.
A car like the CZ26 is exactly the kind of benchmark worth pointing to when deciding whether a Special Projects commission is really worth the two-year process it takes to get there.