Ferris Bueller’s Ferrari for sale!

Few movie cars elicit such effervescent reception as this. Ladies and gentlemen of The Web, may we humbly present to you an icon of the 1980s movie landscape: Ferris Bueller's Ferrari is up for sale!

Well, we say Ferrari, but we all know it's actually a replica of the 250 GT Spyder; a car that can make adenoidal types weep with fact-filled tears, and the rest of Planet Earth weep with utter joy.

Still, it's best remembered as the car that gave Ferris and pals their unbridled freedom for a day, and the car that made Cameron implode with rage and do something that still haunts the minds of petrolheads to this day (yes, he ‘killed the car').

The story behind this is rather interesting too. The company who made the replica, Modena Spyder California, was brought to director John Hughes' attention following a magazine spread, and he promptly called in entrepreneurs Neil Glassmoyer and Mark Goyett into his office - replica in tow - for a look. As Neil recalls: "This scruffy-looking fellow came out of the building, began looking the car over and then looked up at a window and shouted ‘this is it!'" Turns out the scruffy-looking fellow was Hughes, and his deliberation over the 250 GT replica or a Porsche 911 Turbo was immediately resolved.

Three were built for the movie - a hero car, a stunt car, and a rolling fiberglass shell used for, ahem, that scene. The hero and stunt car wound up getting broken suspension because of the big jump scene that took nine takes. Those pesky parking attendants.

The company that made it was sold soon after Ferris hit the screens, but Glassmoyer managed to buy back this example, and has spent the last ten years restoring it to its former glory. Underneath the fiberglass skin is a steel tube-frame chassis built by an Indy Car fabricator, independent front suspension, a solid rear axle with four-link attachments and Panhard rod and coil-over shocks.

The original 1963 Ford V8 was binned in favour of a balanced and blueprinted 5.7-litre V8 bored out to 7.0-litres, with forged pistons, aluminium cylinder heads and a forged steel crankshaft. The result? Quite astonishing, really. The 1,200kg Modena Spyder now pumps out 500bhp, giving it a power-to-weight ratio of 416bhp per tonne. Woah.

There are some chromed wheels. There is a new tan leather interior. There is red coachwork. And there will always be the fact that this very car starred in one of the finest movies of the 1980s. It's being offered up by Mecum Auctions (who sold that one-off Shelby Mustang a while back for over a million) and will go up for auction on 17 August in Monterey, California. You want it. After all, life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it...