Ferrari supercars are pretty much synonymous with the color red, to the point where average sports cars are mistakenly called “Ferraris” by people who aren’t into cars. In recent years, blue shades have become popular: Azzurro California, Azzurro Dino, or Blue America. However, if you want a non-red Ferrari, your first choice is probably going to be yellow. This poses the question of which yellow Ferrari is the nicest. And it just so happens that avid collector David Lee has a whole collection of them for you to choose from.
I know that Maranello Ferrari has a nice collection of yellow supercars with stripes, which include the Scuderia 16M, 458 Speciale, Speciale Aparte, 488 Pista, Pista Spider, and the V12-powered F12 TDF. But outside of that, the only large collection of yellow Ferraris belongs to the famous collector David Lee.
David Lee is renowned within the Ferrari owner community and in fact, made the F50 cooler by bringing a couple of them to Jay Leno a few years back. His garage consists of about 30 exotics which include true classics from the early days of Ferrari, modern classics, and brand-new ones. In fact, he’s just added the 296 GTB in yellow and has a Purosangue on the way.
Besides red, yellow is the primary color of the Ferrari brand. It’s on almost all their fancy enameled badges, their shield logos, and their wheel caps. “Giallo,” which is Italian for yellow, was chosen by Enzo himself more than 70 years ago because it’s also the symbolic color of Modena, the first city that housed his Scuderia Ferrari.
We’re not 100% sure about this, but David Lee’s Ferraris may not be all the same shade of yellow. The F40s were supposed to be finished in Giallo Fly while normal cars usually got Giallo Modena and the F12 TDFs got Giallo Triplo Strato which is deeper and slightly metallic. Regardless, these are very rare supercars or have a very special spec.
And we’ll start off the list with the Ferrari 296 GTB, a new arrival. This revolutionary new supercar features an efficient V6 hybrid powertrain packing 818 horsepower and has been fitted with the Assetto Fiorano Track Package which adds $74,000 to the price of this $330,000 yellow rocket.
A red Enzo was the first exotic that David Lee ever bought and he liked it so much that he bought a second one in yellow, one of just 8 finished in this color. Most people don’t like the look of the F50, but this collector loves the V12-powered mid-engined monster, so he bought one of 349 examples in yellow and one of just 31 in yellow. It’s worth more than $5,000,000 because of its rarity. As we said, this pair was featured on Jay Leno’s Garage, and they’re award-winning Concours examples.
The F40 is actually more common than the F50. Lee has two of those as well, a red one and one in yellow, which Ferrari never officially offered. It’s worth at least $3 million, probably more because of the color. This arrived 8 months ago, and he said “3/5 of the Big Five” which means he wants to add a yellow LaFerrari and a 288 GTO. He’s already got the red versions for all of them and jokes he wants matching mustard and ketchup bottles.
Front-engined Ferraris in yellow
In the meantime, another Ferrari segment is well represented by David’s collection. His collection includes the 1971 Ferrari 365 Daytona Spyder, one of only 120 examples of the GTS/4 that’s worth around $2.3 million. That too was on Jay Leno’s Garage, only two months ago. In fact, David has been on the famous car show 11 times.
But I think the best looking of them all is the 1964 Ferrari 250 Lusso Competizione. With rich racing history and belonging to the golden era of the Prancing Horse, it’s almost impossible to price, probably over $2,000,000 right now.
It’s almost a shame to drive something like that, which is why the collector has an identical spec on his 2017 F12 TDF. But that too is valuable, a 1-of-1 special edition named TDF DSKL after him. His collection is worth a combined $50 million, and it’s amazing to wonder how much is dedicated to the color yellow.
