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 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 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
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
Pininfarina, The House: Ninety-Five Years of Shaping Cars That Other People Built The Geneva Motor Show of 2012. Ferrari unveiled the F12berlinetta. A brutal car — naturally aspirated V12, razor lines, the last card played by pre-turbo Maranello. Nobody made much of it that morning, but the F12 was the last road-going Ferrari drawn by … Read more
Ferrari 512 BB: The Boxer That Never Was There is a Ferrari where almost nothing written on the car turns out to be true. The engine is not a boxer, despite half a century of the factory saying it is. The two letters in the name do not mean what Ferrari says they mean, according … Read more
Ferrari Daytona: The Name Enzo Cancelled America gave this car its name. America redrew its face. America ran it across the continent in thirty-five hours. America faked it twice over. And then America priced Ferrari’s twelve-cylinder engine out of the country for eleven years. The 365 GTB/4 is one of the most imposing things Maranello … Read more
Ferrari Testarossa: The Most American Italian Supercar Ever Built Italy gets the credit. America wrote the rules. The single most recognizable piece of 1980s car design came out of a US regulation. The car’s fame came from a Miami cop show and a Japanese arcade cabinet. The convertible everyone remembers was cut open in Southern … Read more
Ferrari Pinin: The Car That Proved Enzo Didn’t Run Ferrari We take one thing for granted that simply isn’t true: that Enzo Ferrari did whatever he pleased at Ferrari. The old man, the patriarch, sole master of the Prancing Horse, deciding by decree what got built and what didn’t. Well, there was one car — … Read more
