The Ferrari 250 GTO
Beauty, in the 250 GTO, was a by-product of going faster.
Ferrari built it between 1962 and 1964 for a single purpose, which was to win. Gran Turismo Omologato: a grand tourer made legal for the road so that it could be raced, in the years when those two ideas still shared a garage. That it became the most coveted object on four wheels was almost beside the point.
No one, strictly speaking, drew it. Giotto Bizzarrini worked out the early aerodynamics on the road and in the wind, reading the car rather than a sketch; after the engineers' walkout of 1961, Mauro Forghieri carried the work on, and Sergio Scaglietti beat the aluminium into shape by eye and by hand. The low nose, the cut-off Kamm tail, the three louvres behind each wheel — each one answers a question about air, not a question about taste. It is the same case we make for a well-cut lapel: line follows purpose, and beauty looks after itself.
Under the long bonnet sits the Colombo V12 — three litres, six Weber carburettors, something close to three hundred horsepower arriving at an operatic 7,500 rpm. A five-speed gearbox, a slim tubular chassis, a kerb weight under nine hundred kilograms. It would run to a hundred and seventy-four miles an hour, a figure that in 1962 still belonged to aircraft.
And it did the work it was made for. The GTO took the GT class of the world championship in 1962, 1963 and 1964, won the Tour de France more than once, and held its own at Le Mans. Homologation was meant to require a hundred examples; Ferrari built thirty-six and relied on the goodwill of the scrutineers, which was granted. Whether the true number is thirty-six or thirty-nine depends on how you count the later, larger-engined cars — a debate best left to the men with the chassis plates in front of them.
The market has since done what it does with scarcity and legend. In 2023 a single example passed fifty-one million dollars at auction; the cars that change hands privately are said to go for rather more. The figure is the least interesting thing about it. The GTO is the proof that an object built only to work, and built entirely by hand, tends to come out beautiful — the kind of car you would point, without hurry, down the coast road to Capri.
