AC Motorsport and Italian racing house Michelotto have pulled the cover off the Gruppo 4 Tributo, a new sports car built from scratch to look, weigh, and drive like a Ferrari 308. It tips the scales at 950 kilograms. That’s 2,094 pounds, or about 140 kg less than the original 308 it pays homage to.
Let that number sink in while Ferrari sells the F80 hypercar at north of $3.6 million and the 849 Testarossa with styling that divides every room it enters.
Francesco Calzavara founded AC Motorsport just two years ago after a stint working at Michelotto, the Padova-based engineering firm famous for building Group 4 rally-spec 308 GTBs that actually competed in the World Rally Championship. That lineage is the whole point here. The car’s name, Gruppo 4 Tributo, is a direct nod to those championship machines.
But this isn’t a restomod. There’s no donor 308 underneath. The Tributo rides on a custom tubular chassis wrapped in lightweight composite body panels.
The silhouette is unmistakably 308, from the low nose with pop-up headlights to the rear clamshell with four round taillights. Flared fenders and an exposed carbon fiber diffuser give it a harder stance than the original ever had.
Under the clamshell sits a naturally aspirated 3.4-liter V8 producing 380 horsepower and 269 pound-feet of torque. Those numbers won’t make anyone faint. The power-to-weight ratio will.
At roughly 400 hp per ton, the Tributo lands in serious territory without needing turbos, electric motors, or a seven-figure price tag.
The transmission is a dog-leg manual with a metal gated shifter. No dual-clutch option. No paddle shift. The message is unsubtle.
Inside, the prototype is raw. A flat carbon fiber dashboard holds a screen ahead of the driver and a bank of physical switches across the center. Carbon fiber racing seats and a three-spoke wheel complete the cockpit.
It’s sparse, maybe too sparse for the exterior’s level of finish, but the priorities are clear. This car was designed around the act of driving, not around a luxury brief.
Star-shaped wheels wrapped in Pirelli rubber sit behind those swollen fenders. Side intakes behind the doors feed the mid-mounted V8. Horizontal DRLs flank a blacked-out front grille, and functional vents punctuate the hood and front quarters, just as they did on the car that inspired it.
The timing feels deliberate. Maranello’s current lineup leans ever harder into hybridization, active aerodynamics, and design language that polarizes even loyal customers. The Gruppo 4 Tributo asks what a Ferrari might look like if the company had kept subtracting weight instead of adding technology.
AC Motorsport hasn’t announced pricing or a production timeline. For a low-volume Italian sports car with a bespoke chassis, a flat-plane V8, and composite bodywork, nobody should expect a bargain. But the cost of admission matters less than the bet Calzavara is making: that there’s still a market for a mid-engine V8 car you can feel through your fingertips at seven-tenths.
Whether Michelotto’s name and engineering pedigree can carry a brand that didn’t exist three years ago remains the open question. The recipe is right. The execution, at least on paper, is disciplined. Production realities have killed prettier ideas than this one.
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