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At 10 p.m. on a Saturday night, it’s curiously quiet just up the road from the Lodge at Pebble Beach, which in a few hours will become the teeming locus of this year’s Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance. Crews are undoubtedly scurrying to finish up preparations ahead of the moment the first automobiles will roll onto the lawn, just eight hours from now, but over on the 17th fairway, it’s practically silent. Seventy Ferraris sit, most of them covered, some by plastic sheeting, some under custom-fitted covers. And we’re just wandering around, taking them in, alone, under the high Monterey fog.
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We’d been invited down to the grass by Ferrari North America public relations representative and photographer Michael Shaffer, who’d recently taken an interest in light painting and wanted to try it out on some of the historic cars the storied Italian concern had assembled to honor its 70th anniversary. The affable Shaffer, one of the most beloved characters on the international press-junket circuit, is the lens behind plenty of the photos you see credited to “the Manufacturer” in automotive publications. Although he lends his talents to numerous clients, he’s a dyed-in-the-wool member of the tifosi, and he was perhaps even more thrilled than we were to be out among the cars, left alone in darkness to capture their significant forms.
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As far as significance goes, the 212 [above right] pales a bit between the first 125 of 1947 and the series of 250-badged cars that defined Ferrari from the late 1950s well into the ’60s. In contrast to the cars that followed but like its predecessors, the 212 carried a stumpy and pugnacious mien. Younger fans of the marque might find it a bit stodgy; it’s admittedly a car this author has grown to love only as he hit middle age.
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This particular example, a 1951 212 Inter, was the oldest car on the field, exemplifying Ferrari a mere four years into its existence. Despite its civilized demeanor, courtesy of the Giovanni Michelotti–penned Vignale body, it’s got legit motorsport cred. In 1951, Ferrari entered this car in the deadly and grueling Carrera Panamericana. Driven by Pierro Taruffi and Luigi Chinetti, the latter of whom would wind up as Ferrari’s very influential North American importer, this little Inter (distinguished from the 212 Export by its longer wheelbase) won the whole shebang. A second Inter, piloted by Alberto Ascari and Luigi Villoresi, would place second. In honor of the victory, Ferrari produced the 340 Mexico the following year, powered by Aurelio Lampredi’s short-lived larger take on the Ferrari V-12. The 212 carries a 2.6-liter version of the Gioacchino Colombo–designed engine, which bowed in the 125 and saw duty for more than 40 years.
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Mention the number 250 to a Ferrari enthusiast, and the models come fast and furious: SWB Berlinetta, GTO, Tour de France, Testa Rossa, and, of course, California Spider. The Cal Spider was available in both short- and long-wheelbase variants. It’s an SWB car that was so convincingly played by an MG in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. But to some, its older brother—the long-wheelbase, Scaglietti-bodied variant—is the more Hollywood elegant of the pair.
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This 1959 model was originally delivered with metallic blue paint over beige upholstery, its Colombo V-12 making a reported 235 horsepower. It even has a connection to C/D. We tested this very car—still wearing its original paint—in the September 1959 issue of Sports Cars Illustrated, which, as our esteemed deceased readers may remember, was what we called our magazine back then. Not long thereafter, it was traded in for a short-wheelbase GT, and shortly after that, it was repainted red. Since then, it has been restored a number of times, had its color changed to black, and during its most recent restoration in 2011, was sprayed in the attractive Amaranto hue it wears today.
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In the latter half of the 1960s, the Colombo V-12 increased rapidly in displacement, growing from the 250’s 3.0 to the 365’s 4.4 liters. The big engine bowed first in the exceptionally rare 365 California Spider and sold most successfully in the 365GT two-plus-two, but it’s best remembered for its four-cam iteration, the mill that powered the 365GTB/4 Daytona. We found one sitting uncovered next to its short-lived sibling, the four-seat 365GTC/4.
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The Daytona competed in sports-car racing, looking both buff and exceptionally fetching in competizione guise. A knockoff version of the Spider variant (actually a McBurnie-crafted fiberglass body mated to a third-generation Corvette chassis) appeared as the hero car during the first two seasons of Michael Mann’s revolutionary Miami Vice. But most important to this publication, a Kirk F. White–owned example served as the steed that ferried Dan Gurney and our own Brock Yates across the country in 35 hours and 54 minutes during the 1971 running of the Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash. Fifteen years ago, long before his employment at this publication, your author asked Yates whether a more affordable modern car, like a Chevrolet Camaro or a then-new Nissan 350Z, might do the job just as well. His exact words elude recollection, but the Assassin’s eyes went a bit starry as he explained his continued reverence for the old machine, emphatically noting that he’d happily drive the car cross country again.
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West Coast Ferrari distributor and casino magnate Bill Harrah reportedly hated the new 365 Berlinetta Boxer Enzo sent him. He loathed the mid-engined, flat-12–powered car so much that he returned it in exchange for a Daytona that had been sitting around Maranello. The burnt-orange car featured hot cams and rear wheels so wide that the factory added vestigial flares to the rear fenders, making the car a standout among standouts. The rumor goes that Harrah was once approached by a helicopter salesman, who sensibly suggested that air travel would make for a quicker trip between Harrah’s Reno and Tahoe casinos than making the schlep by road. Harrah told the poor sod that if the chopper was indeed faster than his Ferrari between the two points, he’d purchase one. There was supposedly a race. Harrah did not buy the helicopter. That car sold over the weekend at Monterey’s RM Sotheby’s auction for $ 687,500, which, if we’re frank, seems low.
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We wandered across the field, trying to pick out the year of Michael Schumacher’s F310B 1997 Formula 1 car without peeking at its accompanying placard, guessing at which cars sat under covers. We were chuffed when we picked out a 330GTS just by its silhouette under a gray sheet. One particular example of the open 330 remains this author’s personal favorite Ferrari, due to a chance encounter nine years ago. It’s a yellow car featuring a black top and a rare three-abreast seat swathed in blood-red leather, which was spotted outside the banquet hall after the Greenwich Concours d’Elegance. For some reason, just sitting there, surrounded by modern, mass-market Phantoms and Flying Spurs, the convertible from 1967 seemed defiant, radiant, and absolutely perfect in the Connecticut summer night.
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On the far side of the grass, wearing a similar hue to our beloved 330, sat a 288GTO, a car obsessed over by a certain subset of Ferrari nerds for its extreme take on Pininfarina’s beautiful 308GTB design. As iconic as is the 308 is to a generation who grew up watching Tom Selleck wheel a targa-topped GTS around Hawaii, the Dino 246GT’s successor wasn’t one of Maranello’s most stellar performers. Italian engineers weren’t immune to the plagues of the Malaise Era and were struggling to make power and shed weight in a new age of emissions control and more stringent safety regulations. Egged on by the madness of Group B competition in the 1980s, Ferrari turned the 308’s transverse V-8 90 degrees, lengthened the car to accommodate the new longitudinal drivetrain, and bolted a pair of turbos to the debored engine.
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Its bodywork was a hodgepodge of fiberglass, Kevlar, and carbon fiber; only the 308’s steel doors remained. The result, as was the case with many other Group B homologation specials of the era, was utterly nuts, but the Ferrari had no direct rival on the market when it arrived in 1984. What’s more, it never found itself in competition, due to the cancellation of the specification it was built to, and was ultimately overshadowed by its successor, the vaunted F40.
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If the 288 was a thorough rework of the 308, the F40 was an absolute perversion of the shape, as far removed from the 308’s sexed-up take on the 1970s wedge as its competitor for the hearts and minds of young boys in the late 1980s—the Porsche 959—was from a dowdy old 911. In short, if you were 11 years old in 1987, the F40 may as well have come from Mars as from Maranello.
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As with the 959, the F40’s roofline was about all that was left of its predecessors. And if the steel-tube frame underneath was decidedly retrograde tech, even for the day, one piece of the F40 heralded the future of mainline Ferrari road cars. As a 911 Turbo now carries a standard all-wheel-drive powertrain and liquid cooling, so does the 488GTB feature a longitudinally mounted twin-turbo V-8 under its rear glass. The F40 looked like no Ferrari before it, and no Ferrari since has carried its blend of brute purposefulness and Italian beauty quite so well. Perhaps only the track-special FXX K has come close. And unlike the 288, the F40 did see competition, albeit only in the hands of privateers.
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Its 12-cylinder successor, the F50, looks best under a red tarp. Though it’s often hailed as the progenitor of a series of top-line, limited-production Ferraris, the F40 truly marked the end of one era of Ferrari’s history, while the F50 heralded the dawn of another. The latter car is the direct forebear of the super Ferraris that have followed it, the Enzo of 2002 and the recent LaFerrari. In this class, beauty is secondary to purpose, and the purpose is to package everything conceivable that the company has learned from its F1 program into a roadgoing machine capable of going toe to toe with most anything the Volkswagen Group or McLaren can muster.
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Remember, however, that the F50 was ginned up during a time when the only real competition for such a machine was McLaren’s F1, which cost roughly twice as much as the Ferrari. Jaguar’s XJ220 had finished production in 1994, the year before the F50 bowed, and besides, Coventry’s high-speed entry in the supercar sweepstakes offered only a lowly V-6. The 959 was done, leaving the occasional-production 911 GT2 at the top of the line until Porsche’s Carrera GT arrived to do battle with the Enzo. The mid-engined 911 GT1 Straßenversion homologation special was so rare, it hardly counts. During instrumented testing, we found that the F40 largely outperformed its successor and that a pedestrian F355 could outbrake it. Nevertheless, the F50 remains a car of import, a herald of stupefying machines yet to come.
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Under the cover of darkness, wandering freely without throngs of gawkers to impede our view of the machinery, bench-racing cars we’ve only read about in books, we walked the fairway with Ferrari PR man Jeff Grossbard, discussing machines that our jobs occasionally afford us the opportunity to drive, even if the size of our paychecks precludes even considering their purchase. One can get cynical about the lofty perch the brand occupies, the wealth of many of the owners who care more about the prancing horse on the nose than the machinery underneath or the history that black stallion represents. But earlier in the week, the true import of the marque had made itself clear to us.
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Leaving the Inn at Spanish Bay in a blue 488 Spider, we felt a bit plebeian, preceded as we were in immediate departure by a LaFerrari and a Koenigssegg. In that company, the open 488 seemed about as impressive to the assembled gawkers as a Kia Cadenza. But out on Pebble Beach’s 17-Mile Drive, we’d stop among the throngs of tourists who weren’t necessarily in town for the Car Week hullabaloo. At one such pause along the edge of the Pacific, a retiring 13-year-old boy from London, still growing into his newfound height, cautiously approached, snapping pictures as if the Ferrari might be an unpredictable animal, one quick to flee or attack. His father sized us up warily, hoping his son wasn’t in for disappointment at the hand of a unsympathetic adult. We called out, “Hey, you wanna sit in it?” The kid’s face lit up, though he barely said a word. He removed his Adidas sandals before he stepped over the car’s high sill and proceeded to sit silently in the 488’s driver’s seat for probably 15 minutes, taking in the angles of the dash, the purposeful little red-anodized manettino on the steering wheel, the large carbon shift paddles, lost utterly in the dreams that schoolboys dream.
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- Wyld Stallyns: The 12 Greatest Ferraris of All Time
- Our Favorite Cars at the 2017 Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance
- Ferrari: News, Reviews, Photos, and More
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The best thing about a Ferrari—and, by extension, the best thing about communing with 70 of the things at night on an empty fairway—is that it taps in to that sense of awe and wonder that so often gets swept away in the mundanity of adulthood. Whether the first car to captivate you was a 250 Lusso, a 308GTS, or, yes, even an F50, the most wonderful thing about a Ferrari is merely that it exists in the world; that for 70 years these cars have fueled the dreams of generations of children as well as the inner children of many an adult. The racing victories are part of it, surely, as are the legends of men like Chinetti and Lauda, Harrah and Colombo. As is the purple ink that flowed from Il Commendatore’s pen. But to hear a 250 Testa Rossa light off, to catch a glimpse of a 308 on the street, to have the chance, as a kid, just to sit in one of the damn things and drink in the feeling, that’s a good 90 percent of the joy of the marque. The last 10 percent is reserved for owners, and we’re awfully glad the owners of these 70 cars chose to share.
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