There was a minor mystery going around Monterey Car Week this year: Who commissioned the one-of-one open-roof Pininfarina Battista? Turns out it was Michael Jordan. Yes, the very same Michael Jordan from the 1994 Birmingham Barons outfield roster. You might remember him as a basketball player, too.
Jokes aside, the immensely successful athlete’s love of elite sports cars has been documented for decades. That 1992 photo of MJ getting out of a Ferrari 512 TR at the NBA Eastern Conference Semifinals (shot by John Biever for Sports Illustrated) is one of my favorite automotive images of all time, and I don’t even follow sports. Besides, Jordan co-owns a racing team, after all.
The Battista is not as much of a household name as Air Jordan, but it is similarly elite. The electric hypercar claims 1,900 horsepower, a soul-stirring design, and a price tag of $2 million and up. Pininfarina has not disclosed how much MJ paid to get a singular Battista made with a targa-style roof, but the coachbuilder did just confirm that Jordan’s now-delivered car is the only one of its kind.
I wonder if the open roof was a requirement for somebody of Mr. Jordan’s proportions to fit inside the car at all? At any rate, it looks great, and the combination of a silver-and-blue exterior with a tan interior is an extremely classy colorway for a supercar. It’d probably look ace on a sneaker, too.
Few of us will ever be lucky enough to see a Battista, let alone drive one, so I’ll leave you with a passage from our friend Kristen Lee who got behind the wheel two years ago:
“Putting it in Furiosa mode—and thus activating full power—meant a synthesized and sort of pulsating hum/purr reverberated into the cabin. The Pininfarina engineer riding shotgun pointed out the speaker that sat between us as the sound’s source. This was the way the automaker has chosen to aurally articulate the sportiest mode. It was a curious noise, very bassy and low, and made the Verde Paradiso-painted Battista seem like a shimmering, slumbering green dragon. Vrrrrr-RRRRR-rrrrr-RRRRR-rrrrr.
“But, then, when I floored it for the first time, I promptly frightened the shit out of myself.”
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