...supercar specials

Seeing a supercar on the road used to be a special event. As a child, I remember my whole world coming to a halt every time I saw a Porsche or a Ferrari whizz past. It was such an event, and it happened all too infrequently for my tastes. I yearned to catch a glimpse of a bright red 348 or be stunned by a loud Lamborghini and the absence of such moments made them all the more special when they arrived.

Things change though. I grew up in a fairly well-off area of the country and as more and more people had the means for a flash motor, so their appearances became more frequent and less eventful. Porsches appeared on every corner. Even Aston Martins, at one time as rare as any Ferrari sighting, became popular to the point of commonality - a DB9 is a beautiful object but not remotely rare as once a DB5 would have been.

I now live in a "football city" and thanks to inflated wages and even more inflated egos, flash sports cars verge on the common. I can walk to places in the town where I'm guaranteed to see a Ferrari F430, or an Audi R8. I'm a member of the excellent car-spotting website ChasingExotics.com, where some members can photograph half a dozen Lamborghinis in ten minutes if they're in the right spot.

I'd argue that "regular" supercars aren't special any more. Where can we turn then? Where can we get the same excitement of seeing the world's most exciting cars?

Specials. Staggeringly rich individuals can never be seen in the same Ferrari or Lamborghini that a thousand other people have, so they have their own created at great expense.

Now, the Enzo that the car is based on is not what many would call a common car. Too common for James Glickenhaus the man who commissioned the P4/5 for $4m. The re-creation of the classic Ferrari is a stunning design and completely unique. In the near impossible event I should ever see it on the road, I fear my knees would collapse long before I could whip out my camera and fire off a photograph. The same goes for the Ferrari P540 Superfast Aperta. Below the skin, it is but an unexciting 599. On the top, it's another beautiful recreation of a Ferrari from days gone by, with a colour scheme influenced by a car the buyer saw in a film.

Others come to mind. The Sultan of Brunei has had plenty of specials created. Lamborghini have toyed with replicas of the Miura, and cars like the Reventón. These are the new supercars that we can truly lust after. And we can lust after them because, in the tiny chance that we see one powering past us on the roads, it will bring back the shock and awe we felt when witnessing those cars as children.