The word dazzling gets tossed around quite a lot in supercar-related articles, but dazzling is exactly the word for Ken Okuyama’s project car Kode57. The ’57 was first presented to goggling onlookers at last year’s Quail, but we’re giving you another glance at the car because it more than deserves it.

Taking in Okuyama’s design—and his previous designs—what immediately strikes the enthusiast is that this is a man who lives and dies by the sportscar. So many varied design tropes make their way into his projects that seeing one is like seeing the distillation of the evolution of a particular style of track or street-legal racer. They’re usually daring, and usually graceful too, a neat position of equipoise for supercar designs, which frequently tend to favor the one or the other, historical reference or iconoclasm.

Okuyama has designed cars for Ferrari coachbuilder Pininfarina, and Maserati as well. The Kode57 echoes designs from Italian exotic-car and racecar manufacturers, and is built on a Ferrari 599 platform, but the transformation is an acute one. The overall design is serious, but not without the sense of fun and whimsy that is, abstractly, the foundation of a sportscar’s raison d’etre. Reverse hinged doors, then, meet with a 600 horsepower 6.0L V12 and a lightweight aluminum and carbon body. This is a car for an open road on a sunny Saturday, an optimistic, ebullient expression of a thrillingly interactive pastime.

Since working for Pininfarina and Maserati, Okuyama has established his own craftsman-style business. Other designs from Ken Okuyama Cars you may want to check out include the Kode7 and Kode9.

If you’ve fallen in love, though, you’d better hurry along to the bank. Only five Kode57 examples have been earmarked for production, at $2.5 million a pop.