Driving Ferrari's V12 Le Mans racer – car pictures of the week
A car of unusual origin, Henry Catchpole drives the unlikely Ferrari endurance racing winner
One of the last in a front-engined V12 Ferrari race car lineage that also contains the 250 GTO, seat time in a 550 Maranello Prodrive doesn’t come around often. Henry Catchpole has been driving one of the ten made, a car that raced at Le Mans no fewer than five times. Here are our favourite images by Rich Pearce from an epic track test.
It surely is a weird one, the race-spec 550. Incredibly successful, an icon of its era sure. But not one Ferrari sanctioned at the time, for it was Prodrive that saw potential in the first front-engined Ferrari V12 flagship since the 365 as a basis for a competition vehicle. Their vision clearly came to pass, a 550 Prodrive winning its class at Le Mans in 2003 a full 40 minutes ahead of the second-placed Corvette.
In 2004 this car was being shared by none other than Colin McRae (one what has to be one of the great motoring busman’s holidays), Darren Turner (who’d go on to see great success with Prodrive and Aston Martin) and Rickard Rydell, 1998 BTCC champion. Though it was 2003 that the car appeared in the distinctive livery you see here.
The last V12 Ferrari to win at Le Mans, the Peter Stevens-penned 550 Prodrive is a sure fire icon and for its stature, is still underappreciated in 2025, though not by Catchpole, who fell head over heels during his drive in evo November 2025:
‘So paper-cut sharp is the response of the right-hand pedal that it takes a few laps to tune in my sensitivity and get the timings of feet and hands just so, but in the meantime the 550 is actually very forgiving.
‘You can stay committed even when you feel the car buck over the surprisingly big bumps in Hammerhead, the period-correct Koni dampers struggling to control the sudden impacts but the car tracking true even as the revs flare. And the more you push it, the more it talks to you, and so the dynamic picture starts to build in your mind.’ – Henry Catchpole, evo November 2025.
Order your issue of evo November 2025 from the evo shop today
