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
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
Maserati 5000 GT: The Supercar a King Paid For Because Maserati Couldn’t In January 1962, Sports Car Graphic ran a road test that should have made the Maserati 5000 GT a household name in America. Bernard Cahier had been handed a one-off Ghia-bodied car before its owner took delivery, and he came back describing acceleration he had … Read more
Ferrari F355: The Car Honda Forced Into Existence The most beloved Ferrari of the 1990s exists because a Japanese company embarrassed Maranello. That is the part of the story that gets skipped. People talk about the sound, the five valves, the Pininfarina lines. Far less gets said about the state Ferrari was actually in when … 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
Lancia Beta Montecarlo: the car that changed brand three times before it existed Some cars are born with a clear identity from the first CAD sketch. They know what they’re going to be, which brand they belong to, which segment they target. Everything after that is just execution. And then there are cars like the … Read more
Vincenzo Lancia: the racing driver who became a manufacturer and refused to let his cars race Here’s a paradox that almost never gets told and that defines this man better than anything else. Vincenzo Lancia, before he turned thirty, was arguably the fastest racing driver in Italy. He drove for Fiat. He racked up podiums … Read more
