Ferrari charges a $200,000 premium for a simulated manual gearbox in the 12Cilindri Manuale. Michelotto, the Italian firm that built Ferrari’s actual race cars for over five decades, just answered with something that makes that surcharge look absurd.
The Gruppo Four Tributo is a ground-up machine wearing the unmistakable wedge silhouette of the Ferrari 308 GTB, but carrying zero Ferrari badges. It weighs 2094 pounds. It runs a naturally aspirated 3.4-liter all-aluminum V-8 making 380 horsepower at 8250 rpm.
It has a dogleg five-speed manual gearbox with no electronic intermediary pretending to be mechanical. And it has pop-up headlights.
This is not a restomod. There is no donor car underneath. The Tributo starts with a tubular steel chassis incorporating a full roll cage, then gets draped in carbon composite body panels shaped to echo the 308’s lines.
Think of it less as a restoration and more as a spiritual successor built by the people who knew the original better than Ferrari itself.
Michelotto’s credentials are not up for debate. The company prepared the F40 LM, the most ferocious variant of Ferrari’s defining 1980s supercar. It also campaigned the 308 in Group 4 rally competition, a program that delivered Ferrari’s only WRC podium finish.
The Tributo is a collaboration between Michelotto and AC Motorsport, a newer outfit founded by a former Michelotto engineer. The car is set up exclusively for tarmac, not gravel, so this is no rally recreation. But the philosophy is pure competition thinking applied to a road car: strip weight, use a simple powertrain, trust the driver.
No turbochargers. No hybrid system. No dual-clutch automated transmission dressed up to feel analog. The contrast with modern Maranello product could not be sharper.
Ferrari’s current engineering ethos layers complexity on top of complexity, then reverse-engineers some of it away to sell a “manual” experience. Michelotto skipped all of that and just built the thing properly.
The F40 itself followed a similar arc. Enzo Ferrari originally conceived it for Group B racing, but when that series collapsed, the car became a road-legal missile with a turbocharged V-8 and body panels so thin you could flex them with your thumb. The Gruppo Four Tributo carries that same DNA, a race car’s priorities expressed through a street machine’s proportions.
Pricing and production numbers have not been disclosed, but expect both to reflect the hand-built, low-volume reality of boutique Italian manufacturing. Given that Ferrari wants north of $400,000 for the 12Cilindri Manuale before options, and that car’s “manual” is really a robotized unit with a metal gate bolted to the console, Michelotto’s approach starts to look less like nostalgia and more like a correction.
The car world is full of tributes, homages, and continuations that trade on borrowed glory. Most of them are expensive cosplay. This one comes from the shop that actually prepped the original for battle, built by hands that understand why the 308 mattered in the first place.
Michelotto has not announced a delivery timeline. The company is still accepting expressions of interest, which in this segment means the cars are likely already spoken for by collectors who know exactly what 2094 pounds and a flat-plane V-8 at 8250 rpm feels like.
Share this Story