Ferrari has never been shy about protecting the sanctity of the prancing horse, sending legal notices over everything from unauthorised use of the Cavallino to liveries of questionable taste. But a Russian stuntman with a taste for spectacle just gave Ferrari’s legal department a new headache. The influencer, Evgeny Chebotarev, took a Ferrari F8 Spider, reportedly worth around $350,000, wrapped cables around its wheels, hoisted it with a crane, flipped it completely upside down, and lowered it into water until its roof was partially submerged. Then he gunned a jet ski straight at the car’s flat underbody, used it as a launch ramp, sailed several meters through the air and splashed down like it was the most normal use of a Ferrari.
The Ferrari in question isn’t some broken beater picked out from a scrapyard for the abuse. The F8 Spider packs a 3.9-liter twin-turbo V8 making 720 horsepower, good for 0-60 mph in 2.9 seconds and a top speed of 211 mph. Dry weight comes in around 3,086 lb with the lightweight options ticked, and the retractable hardtop folds away in 14 seconds flat. None of that mattered for this particular outing. The underbody, designed by Ferrari’s engineers to help keep the car on the ground at 211 mph, was put to use launching a watercraft into the air instead. There’s something deeply poetic about that, no?
The clip, posted to Instagram with the caption “Thank you #ferrari,” needed no further explanation to rack up over 218,000 likes and more than 4,200 comments within days. Whether that caption reads as gratitude or provocation probably depends on how much of a sense of humor Maranello’s legal department choses to exhibit. According to Gazeta, somewhere in the aftermath of the stunt, the crew reportedly found a live crayfish that swimming around in the partly flooded cabin, just to make things worse.
As for how Chebotarev funds stunts of this scale, this particular one being #155 in his own running series, the picture is murkier than the water he dunked the Ferrari in. He started out in landscaping and construction site prep, later sold rights to an early stunt video to American buyers, opened a Hollywood themed restaurant in Rostov, and now runs FlyCar, a business importing vehicles from the US, UAE, China, Europe, Korea and Japan. With 3.27 million Instagram followers and, by his own admission, millions of rubles spent per stunt, Ferrari’s lawyers might want to save this one’s contact details.
