The Ferrari 365 P2: The Factory Racer That Never Got the Recognition It Deserved

August 17, 2026

Quick Takeaways

Only four Ferrari 365 P2s were ever built, making it one of the rarest factory prototype racers in Ferrari's history.
The car competed at Le Mans, Sebring, and the Nürburgring in 1965, establishing the mid-engine prototype layout that Ferrari would refine into its dominant 1966 and 1967 machines.
It's rarely discussed alongside the more famous 250 LM or the 330 P3/P4, but without the 365 P2, those cars don't exist in the form they do.
The 1965 Ferrari 365 P2 is available in the Concours Photo Art Racing Legends collection in all three finishes.

The Car That Built the Template

In the history of Ferrari's endurance racing program, certain cars get all the attention. The 250 LM is celebrated for being the last Ferrari to win Le Mans outright in the sports car class. The 330 P3 and P4 are revered for the 1967 season that saw Ferrari dominate the world's most demanding circuits. But the car that made all of that possible, the machine that established the mechanical and structural template those later racers were built on, is the 365 P2. And it almost never gets its due.

Ferrari built four of them in 1965. The 365 P2 used a 4.4-liter V12 producing around 380 horsepower in a mid-engine layout that gave it handling characteristics the front-engine Ferraris of the previous decade couldn't match. It was the next step in a development process that Maranello had been running since the late 1950s, and it reflected everything the factory's engineers had learned from racing at the highest level for nearly two decades.

What It Did on Track

The 365 P2 raced at Le Mans in 1965, alongside the 250 LM that ultimately won the race outright. It raced at Sebring and the Nürburgring. It competed in a period when endurance racing was genuinely dangerous, when the cars were fast enough to be lethal and the circuits were unforgiving enough to make that danger immediate. The drivers who campaigned the P2 weren't doing it for prize money. They were doing it because there was nothing else like it.

The car didn't win Le Mans in 1965. That result went to the 250 LM. But what the 365 P2 generated in terms of data, development direction, and engineering confidence was arguably more valuable than a single race victory. The 330 P3 that appeared in 1966 and the P4 that dominated in 1967 were direct descendants of everything the factory learned from the P2's season. You can trace a straight line from those four cars to Ferrari's most celebrated endurance racing period.

What the Car Looks Like

The 365 P2 is a mid-engine prototype, which means the proportions are different from the front-engine grand tourers that most people associate with 1960s Ferrari. The nose is low and tapered. The cockpit sits centrally in the bodywork. The tail rises over the engine to manage high-speed airflow in the years before wings and aerodynamic downforce became standard tools. It's a purposeful shape, with none of the decorative flourishes that characterize Ferrari's road car designs from the same period.

In photographs, it reads as a car that's moving even when it's standing still. The long, low nose, the sweeping roofline, and the tight rear bodywork give it a visual tension that's hard to explain but immediately apparent. It's what happens when a design is dictated entirely by function and the function is going as fast as possible for as long as possible on the most demanding circuits in the world.

Why It's Underappreciated

The 365 P2 sits in an awkward position in Ferrari's racing history. It came after the 250 LM, which has the Le Mans victory. It came before the 330 P3 and P4, which have the dominant season. The P2 is the development step between two more celebrated chapters, which is exactly why it doesn't get talked about the way it should. But that's a bias toward results over process, and the process the 365 P2 represents was essential.

Only four were built. All four survive. When one appears at a concours event, which doesn't happen often, it competes extremely well because the design is coherent, the history is significant, and the car looks exactly like what it is: a machine built by serious people to go racing at the highest level at a moment when that was a genuinely dangerous thing to do.

Bottom Line

The Ferrari 365 P2 didn't win Le Mans. It did something harder: it figured out how to build the car that eventually would. Four were made. All four matter. And the one in the Concours Photo Art Racing Legends collection is photographed the way it deserves to be, which is closely, and with the seriousness the car earned on the circuits of 1965.

The 1965 Ferrari 365 P2 is available in our Racing Legends series in Color, Black and White, and Stylized finishes.

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