Someone’s Building An F1-Esque Road Car With Ferrari Power

How do you get to a point in life when you're building a road-legal Formula 1 car powered by a Ferrari F12berlinetta V12 engine? It starts with Batman, specifically Tim Burton's 1989 Batman, and its iconic Batmobile. Or that's how it happened for Zac Mihajlovic, who built his own Batmobile. Interest in the homemade vehicle – people wanting their own – got him thinking about something just as wild he could build and sell, and he landed on a road-legal F1 car.

"What's the next-most extreme thing I could build to drive on the street?," Mihajlovic told WhichCar. "No one's done it with an F1 car, they've done things like the BAC Mono or the Ariel Atom, but they're four-cylinder and look like concept cars."

So, Mihajlovic began his project, sourcing a Ferrari 6.3-liter V12 from a written-off 2014 Ferrari F12berlinetta. He said it should produce around 740 horsepower. The transmission he sourced from Albins, a company that builds gearboxes for cars of the Australian Supercars Championship.

Mihajlovic has documented the build on his Instagram, posting photos of the car in various stages of completion. However, Mihajlovic says the car is much closer to being done than his Instagram alludes. He hopes to begin testing the vehicle by the end of the year.

The car has several neat features that will help it navigate various road surfaces, using his experience with the Batmobile to make his F1 car livable on the street. It will feature a hydraulic lift system for tricky curbs and driveways, a system to remove the front bodywork in about 12 seconds, a straight-through exhaust, and an air-brake. But that's not all. Mihajlovic was mindful of working on the car.

"We're the ones who are going to have to work on it and fix it, so we've put so much thought into how to maintain the car, how to change the oil, and how to access everything, because obviously when Lambo or Ferrari builds a car it goes somewhere else, and it's up to the dealership," he told the publication.

This is more than just an F1 car turned road car. Mihajlovic has thought about living with the car on a daily basis – not that many people would drive this all the time. The price for one of Mihajlovic's road-legal F1 cars will be more than $1 million, which is a lot of money, but you are getting something special.