Ferrari 308: The First Turbo Ferrari Was a Tax Dodge Ask any enthusiast which was the first turbocharged Ferrari road car and you will get the 288 GTO of 1984. They will say it with confidence, because it is what gets repeated everywhere. It is wrong. The first one arrived two years earlier, displaced two … Read more
Ferrari F12: The Car That Killed the Gear Lever Several articles in this series have been following a countdown. Here it reaches zero. The F12berlinetta is the first Ferrari twelve-cylinder that did not offer a manual gearbox even as an option. Not one car. The 599 we covered in its own piece stands permanently as … Read more
Ferrari 348: Condemned for Arriving Without Enzo In the two previous pieces in this series, the 348 plays the villain. In the F355 article it is the car that nearly sank Ferrari. In the 360 article it is the one carrying a grille that cooled nothing. It has earned its own page, because the sentence … Read more
Ferrari 456: The Station Wagon Maranello Erased When Ferrari launched the Purosangue, half the planet reacted the same way: the company was betraying its essence by building a family car. Ferrari had already built a station wagon. And a four-door saloon. And a four-seat convertible. All on the same platform, in the 1990s, with the … Read more
Ferrari 550 Maranello: The Return the Recession Paid For Ferrari has spent thirty years selling this car as a triumphant return to tradition. The twelve-cylinder goes back up front, the grand tourer reclaims its place, Maranello reconnects with its roots. The part left out of the brochure is that the finance department made a good … Read more
Ferrari 400: The V12 With a General Motors Gearbox In 1976, with Enzo Ferrari alive and in charge, Maranello launched a twelve-cylinder fitted with an automatic gearbox bought in Detroit. The same unit Cadillacs and Buicks used. Ferrari fitted it to win the American market. It then never sold a single car here. The gearbox … Read more
Ferrari 612 Scaglietti: Cheap Because of a 1954 Gift It is the most affordable twelve-cylinder you can buy wearing the Maranello badge, and it is affordable because of its shape. The side scallops that wrecked its value are a quotation of a one-off a film director commissioned as a gift for his wife. The wife … Read more
Alfonso de Portago: The Spanish Marquis Who Tried to Live a Hundred Years in Twenty-Eight Adam Driver’s Ferrari put a Brazilian actor named Gabriel Leone in the role of a Spanish marquis most American audiences had never heard of, and that’s the injustice this piece is here to fix. Alfonso de Portago wasn’t a side … Read more
Ferrari 599: The Last Ferrari With a Gear Lever In 2012 a chassis numbered 187007 left Maranello. A 599 GTB Fiorano with a six-speed manual and an aluminum gate. It was the last Ferrari that would ever be built with a shift lever. Ferrari said nothing. No announcement, no press release, no internal video. Out … Read more
Ferrari 360 Modena: The Italian Ferrari With an American Spine Ferrari named this car after the town where Enzo was born. It gave that name to the car that ended the way that town used to work. The F355 it replaced was the last Ferrari with hand-built coachwork produced in Modena. The 360 arrived with … Read more
Alfa Romeo 33/2 Coupé Speciale: The Ferrari Show Car That Became an Alfa The man who designed the Ferrari F40 also designed a bright yellow Alfa Romeo. Almost nobody knows that. What even fewer people know is that the Alfa was not really designed as an Alfa at all. It was a Ferrari show car … Read more
Alfa Romeo 8C Competizione: The Alfa That Alfa Romeo Didn’t Build America got 84 of them. Maybe 90. Nobody has nailed that number down either, and that turns out to be the whole story of this car. The Alfa Romeo 8C Competizione was the car that brought Alfa Romeo back to the United States after … Read more
