The 355 by Evoluto will get a 500bhp option, and start from… £690,000

“The crucial part about older cars is you didn’t have to be going fast to enjoy them,” Evoluto’s technical boss Amjad Ali tells TopGear.com. “The problem with modern cars is to properly enjoy them, you need to take them out on a track.

“The idea behind Evoluto is to bring some of that fun back.”

And it’s an idea that – in the shape of its first offering, a ‘remastered’ Ferrari F355 – will cost you from… £690,000. According to the team behind one of the prettiest cars from this year’s Goodwood Festival of Speed, you’re getting more than just a warmed up F355.

“I don’t want to call it a restomod,” said Ali, “because it’s a lot more than a restomod. It’s a ‘remastered’ car.” Before we get to the whole ‘remastering’ bit, perhaps some context – why go back to work on one of the best mid-engined V8 Ferraris?

“For its time it was achingly beautiful,” he said. “But it’s 30 years old now, so we’ve used modern technology to enhance it.”

About 4,000 hours go into each 355 by Evoluto build, with everything done in-house; Evoluto is part of the DRVN group, which also houses Boreham Motorworks who’s (re)doing the Mk1 Escort and RS200.

Ali said each car is engineered as though it were factory-standard. “We’re melding that OEM level in terms of process, procedures and engineering detail, together with the restomod world, to make a sort of hybrid model.

“We’re engineering the car from the ground up,” he added.

Each chassis – as supplied by a customer – gets stripped right back, after which Evoluto then begins bonding carbon into the structure to stiffen and reinforce it. It’s a claimed 23 per cent stiffer than the original F355, which then allows them to turn up the power on Ferrari’s nat-asp 3.5-litre V8.

“We scanned the cylinder head, CFD tested it, and worked out how to increase the airflow. In the old days, you’d grind and polish the ports – now we’ve got CNC machining, so it’s repeatable, and precise.

“We honed the head, changed the valves [of which there are five per cylinder, don’t forget], and we’ve used bigger cams. We could have gone a bit wilder and probably got a bit more power out of it, but that’s something to look at in the future,” he said.

How wild? Up to 500bhp is an option if a customer so chooses. “There’s an option to take the engine up to 3.9 litres and 500 horsepower. In a 1,250kg car, we wouldn’t go further than that. At the moment it’s great – a tractable engine, and it revs to 8,500rpm.”

He confirmed the initial batch of cars – around half of the 55-car allocation has been accounted for – will feature the launch spec of 414bhp. Other F355 owners were waiting for the car’s reveal, while a further few wanted to see it in the flesh at Goodwood. 

(Remember: Ferrari absolutely churned these things out, with just under 12,000 F355s finding homes since its 1994 launch. So they’re not short of donors.)

And it’s a stunning thing up close, with Ian Callum and his team taking the F355’s handsome lines and adding just a touch more menace. It’s subtly wider, the brakes are simply enormous, the interior a complete transformation, while the 288 GTO-inspired strakes on the rear are a neat touch.

The suspension meanwhile, is still being finalised, Ali said, and while the finished car on display wears passive dampers from Nitron, the team are looking into adaptive units. “There’ll be a level of adjustability to it in the future,” he said. “It’s about compliance.

“I don’t want to just test it on track because that’ll become the focus of it. It’s going to be set up for real world on-road driving. It’ll be a fun analogue car. If we can set the car up for UK roads, which are the worst in the world, the car will work anywhere,” he added.

Is there a danger of tuning out the original F355’s balance and character? “It’s a fine balance,” he conceded. “You’ve got to keep the quirks of the original car in there, because they’re part of the character.

“This thing is never going to out-handle a Ferrari 458. It’s not designed to do that. In my past life [at Gunther Werks in California] we were trying to emulate the newer cars and be quicker than them. This is taking you back to basics.”