Max Hazan has built a motorcycle around a Ferrari V8, and somehow the most surprising part isn’t that it exists—it’s that it works. It’s called the HF355, and it’s just changed hands for over $500,000, which sounds faintly ridiculous until you spend about ten seconds thinking about what’s actually involved here.
Because this isn’t some overstyled custom with a big motor dropped in for effect. It’s a properly thought-through, deeply engineered thing. Still completely mad, obviously. But not careless.
The engine comes from a Ferrari F355 – a 3.5-liter naturally aspirated V8 that makes around 400 HP and revs to 8,500 rpm. Hazan found it while casually browsing online for something entirely different – usually how terrible ideas begin. Except this one stuck.
He saw it sitting on a dolly, picked it up slightly, and realized it was a bit smaller than expected. That was enough. From there, it spiraled into an 18-month exercise in seeing how far you can push one idea before it breaks you.
The architecture is where it gets properly interesting. There’s no traditional frame. The engine does the structural work, which is the sort of decision that sounds heroic until you imagine the consequences when it doesn’t quite line up. A chromoly trellis bolts directly to the front, while everything else—gearbox, suspension—hangs off the rear of the V8 like it’s been persuaded into place.
And yet, it ends up balanced. Nearly 50/50. Wheelbase of 63 inches. Numbers that suggest someone knew exactly what they were doing, even if the concept itself feels like it shouldn’t cooperate.
At 585 pounds dry, with 400 horsepower, the power-to-weight ratio is somewhere deep into hypercar territory. Which, on a motorcycle, feels… optimistic. You’d want a very steady right hand. Or no sense of self-preservation.
What’s impressive is how much of it Hazan built himself. Not in a polished, high-tech facility, but with manual tools. Proper fabrication. The kind where parts get made, tested, fail, and then come back stronger. He had to design custom spline shafts just to mate the Ferrari crank to a Motus six-speed sequential gearbox. They broke. Of course they did. Then they didn’t.
That’s the whole project in miniature.
Electronics are equally bespoke. The original Ferrari systems were essentially stripped away and replaced with a custom setup running through an AMP EFI ECU. It monitors everything, logs everything, but doesn’t step in to save you. No traction control. No rider aids. No polite intervention when things get out of shape.
Which means when you open the throttle, you’re on your own.
Hazan describes the sound as “Indy car in the pits,” which feels about right. Eight velocity stacks sit just below where your chest would be, dragging air in with alarming urgency. You don’t just hear it—you feel it, constantly. At full throttle, he says it’s “warp speed,” and you get the sense that’s not entirely metaphorical.
There’s a great detail where he thought he’d gone flat out on an early run, only to realize he’d used about half the throttle. That’s the sort of moment that tends to reset your expectations fairly quickly.
Oddly, at lower speeds, it behaves. He says it’s manageable, even predictable on a tight track. Which feels unlikely until you remember the fundamentals are sound. Geometry matters. Balance matters. Get those right, and even something this extreme can feel vaguely normal—right up until it doesn’t.
Visually, it’s just as obsessive. Sixteen carbon-fiber panels, all shaped by hand, starting as foam and gradually refined until the proportions made sense. There’s no CAD perfection here. It’s more instinct, more adjustment, more stepping back and squinting at it until it feels right.
The carbon work itself uses resin infusion techniques you’d normally associate with aerospace, with some input from a composites specialist working with SpaceX. Which explains why it looks so clean, so deliberate, without feeling overworked.
The paint is a deep, custom red—not Ferrari red, deliberately—which feels like the right call. The engine is the star here. Everything else just frames it.
The rest of the components read like a greatest hits list: Brembo GP4X brakes, Öhlins suspension, Marchesini wheels. All the serious stuff, but nothing too flashy for the sake of it. Even the cooling system has been tucked away underneath, shaped into a V duct so it doesn’t interrupt the visual flow of the engine.
That’s the thing that sticks. It’s engineered like a race machine, but composed like a piece of design.
It took about 18 months to get there. Constant revisions, small failures, incremental wins. The usual process, just applied to something far less usual.
And in the end, you get a one-off machine that sits somewhere between sculpture and engineering exercise. Half a million dollars? Yes, it’s a lot for a motorcycle.
Then again, there aren’t many motorcycles that make you question whether they should exist at all—and then quietly prove that they absolutely can.
