Good Find Friday features interesting vehicles we’ve found for sale while conducting market analysis or appraisal research. They are not for sale by Wolf and Mare and we have no business relationship with the sellers. We just think they’re worth learning about and sharing with our readers!

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With the car world fully engulfed in discussion over the Ferrari Luce, it might be easy to overlook another Ferrari with “interesting” styling that is about to be publicly sold, albeit under a sealed bid scenario. Bidding is now open for RM Sotheby’s Sealed June sale, and the 1993 Ferrari Conciso Concept by Michalak is one of the 15 lots on offer.

Bernd Michalak is a German designer who had a burning passion to become a car creator from a young age. In 1979, he and his wife Jutta founded Michalak Design. The business was run as a conceptual design and prototyping house, and the company generated numerous concepts to create buzz for Michalak’s designs and hopefully, new business.

Early Michalak Design work included a body kit to convert the Opel Corsa to a two-seat roadster, which apparently sold well. In 1989, Michalak unveiled the Cilindro, a 3.2-liter V8 powered sports car built to demonstrate his company’s prototype capabilities that also foreshadowed some of the design cues that would appear on the Conciso. 

While the Cilindro was a display car, Michalak’s next concept was built on a donor Ferrari 328 GTS chassis, with its original bodywork completely stripped and replaced with a much smaller, tighter, all-custom exterior. “Conciso” is Italian for “concise” which is effectively the single word brief that drove the car’s design.

The Conciso prototype was shown at the 1993 Frankfurt Motor Show and Geneva Motor Show the following year. Only one example was built, and it was sold to a collector in North America before returning to Europe where it was displayed in the owner’s living room. It was offered for public sale for the first time at RM Sotheby’s Monaco auction in 2018, where it hammered for just €109,250. In his later years, Michalak has shifted the business into automotive art.

This functional one-off styling study is back in the hands of RM Sotheby’s again for their private bidding event ending June 24th and 25th. You can register to bid on the car at the auction’s catalog site.

The exterior design of the Conciso is likely polarizing, but it has some really elegant features among the unusual ones. Overall, it’s designed to be a light and agile sports car and as such the bodywork is hand-formed aluminum by Bachelli & Villa in Italy. Front and rear clamshells provide access to the mechanicals, but there are no doors — you climb over the bodywork as you would a race car.

The rear end is rather attractive with virtually no overhang, and the side of the car features a deep angled intake in Ferrari fashion. The front end may be where it all falls down a bit, with the somewhat inspired gray wheel housings — designed to evoke open-wheel racers from the cockpit — giving the front end a “platypus” appearance when viewed head-on.

Said to be about 30% lighter than a standard Ferrari 328 GTS, it can sprint to 100kph in 5 seconds and reach a top speed of 170mph, which is surely exciting given the lack of any roof or windshield. The interior is “cozy” with narrow seats flanked by large door pockets designed to hold a pair of helmets for driver and passenger.

Jay Leno’s Garage featured this car 6 years ago shortly after it was acquired by its owner at the 2018 Monaco auction. There’s a lot of information packed into this short video, as well as some great driving footage of the car in action. Say what you want about the design, but the coachwork on this car is gorgeous.

The value of an excellent Ferrari 328 GTS was $83,500 back in 2018, so despite the apparent lack of bidding interest in the Conciso in Monaco, its customizations were still worth a premium.

Now, an excellent 1989 Ferrari 328 GTS is worth about $156,000, an 87% increase. Applying a similar appreciation, the Conciso would now be worth €203,205. Were I the auction house, I might use that value to generate an estimate somewhere in the neighborhood of €175,000-€225,000 or $203,000-$261,000.

Apparently, Ferrari was so impressed by Michalak’s work on the Conciso that they permitted the car to wear Ferrari badging, rather than employing their typically aggressive intellectual property protection. In the Ferrari world, this likely gives the car a little more credibility, though at the end of the day it’s not an official factory-commissioned concept, nor one from a design house connected to the brand. This may keep interest and prices contained a bit.

Another negative is that the car is sold on a bill of sale only, meaning it’s not registered or titled for public roadways. This type of limited use may turn off some buyers, except those willing to go through the trouble to secure some kind of identification number or those purely interested in show and display.

Personally, I hope the winning bidder gets it road-legal and drives the pants off it. On sunny days only, of course. Have a great weekend, everyone!

Wolf and Mare provides car finding, appraisal and auction services for sellers and buyers of collector European cars. We also provide importation services. Give us a call or drop us a line!