A speeding Ferrari was cut in half when it hit a power pole along Pacific Coast Highway and crashed onto a Pacific Palisades beach Sunday, killing a passenger and critically injuring the driver.

Basil Max Price III, a 23-year-old resident of Pomona, died at the scene, said Coroner's Investigator Dana Bee.

The crash, about a quarter-mile northwest of Sunset Boulevard, was reported to the Los Angeles Fire Department at 1:27 a.m.. PCH was closed between Santa Monica and Malibu, frustrating thousands of people heading to a popular early-morning triathlon.

Los Angeles police Officer Emilson Saint Julian confirmed one person had died at the scene, and the car was a 1999 model Ferrari. The crash happened at a pair of S-curves just inside the L.A. city limits.

Paramedics took the driver, 24-year-old Vladimir Skvortsov, a resident of Upland, to UCLA Medical Center in critical condition.

The car, heading from Malibu into Pacific Palisades, was cut in two, and both passengers were thrown out, he said. The silver sports car and the men landed on the beach, which is about 30 feet below the road at that point.

The Ferrari knocked down power lines, and authorities closed PCH in both directions while a Department of Water and Power crew worked to make repairs. The road reopened to full traffic at 7 a.m.

The name of the dead man was withheld until his next of kin could be notified.

No other cars were believed to have been involved. Video showed that the mid-engine car was split in two at the passenger compartment.

Los Angeles police with the West Traffic Division handled the investigation.

That stretch of PCH is no stranger to high-speed wrecks involving exotic cars. Twenty miles to the west, on Feb. 21, 2006, a drunken Swedish man crashed a rare Ferrari Enzo at 199 mph and miraculously survived. The driver was later charged in a wide-ranging fraud case involving its purchase and other exotic cars and sentenced to three years in prison.