Ferrari 250 GT California Spyder

Credit here is genuinely shared, and sources still argue about the proportions of it. The design came from Pinin Farina, working from the 250 GT Cabriolet it had already drawn, and the execution came from Sergio Scaglietti's shop in Modena, where panels were beaten over wooden bucks by hand. What Scaglietti's people did with a Pinin Farina drawing is why no two cars are quite identical, and why this one reads as sculpture rather than product. The signatures are the long low nose with the egg-crate grille set into it, the functional bonnet scoop, the shallow cut-down doors, and the way the rear haunch rises and then falls away to a tail with almost no overhang. Headlights came either covered in faired plexiglass or open in chrome rims, at the customer's choice, except on cars sold new in Italy in 1959, where regulations forced them open. Both look right for different reasons, which is why that argument never ends either. The short-wheelbase car lost 200mm from between the axles and gained a squarer, more purposeful stance for it. A removable hardtop was offered, and the cars wearing one look like a different and slightly less interesting machine.

For a car sold as a boulevard Ferrari, the competition record is real. At the 1959 Sebring 12 Hours, Richie Ginther and Howard Hively won the GT class in a California Spyder. Three months later at Le Mans, Bob Grossman and Fernand Tavano took chassis 1451 GT, a factory-built alloy Competizione with an outside-plug Tipo 128F engine, Testa Rossa camshafts, 40mm Webers, an oil cooler and an oversized tank fitted specially for the race, to fifth overall and third in the three-litre GT class after 294 laps. The car had been finished days beforehand. At Sebring in 1960, Carlo Abate, Giorgio Scarlatti and Fabrizio Serena took another GT class win. That is the shape of the car's racing life: privateers, most of them running under Chinetti's North American Racing Team banner, campaigning an open car against closed Berlinettas built for the job and finishing respectably anyway. Ferrari never treated it as a works racer, and the short-wheelbase cars, faster and better braked, actually raced less than the long-wheelbase ones did. The competition cars are worth what they are worth partly because so few were ever asked to do this at all.

The strange thing about the California Spyder's fame is that the car most people picture was never a Ferrari at all. Ferris Bueller's Day Off used three replicas built by Modena Design and Development: fibreglass bodies on tubular steel frames with Ford V8s underneath, Mustang suspension, a Fiat windscreen and Volkswagen tail lights. The one that goes backwards through the glass wall at the end was an empty shell with no engine in it. Modena badged the cars as Ferraris without asking, and the lawsuit that followed put the company out of business. None of that stopped the film from turning a 106-car Ferrari into something a generation of American teenagers could name on sight. The real cars had their own celebrity first. James Coburn owned a black covered-headlight SWB for 25 years; in 2008 it sold at RM's Maranello auction for 7,040,000 euros, about $10.9m, to Chris Evans, becoming the first car ever to pass eight figures at auction. Gerard Blain's car passed to Alain Delon in 1963, was photographed constantly, then vanished into a French barn for decades before Artcurial sold it out of the Baillon collection in 2015 for 16,288,000 euros.

Nobody buys one of these expecting an easy life, and the good news is that the difficulty is mostly logistical rather than mechanical. The Colombo V12 is a robust, conservatively stressed engine that runs a very long time if the oil is changed and the car is warmed properly before it is used. The failure modes are the ordinary ones for a wet-sump 1950s engine: valve guides, tired timing chains, worn synchros in the four-speed box, and carburettor balance that drifts and wants a specialist rather than a screwdriver and optimism. Three Webers on a V12 means twelve throats that all have to agree with each other. The bodies are hand-made steel over a tubular frame, so rust arrives in the sills, floors, boot floor and lower rear wings, and because every panel is unique to its own car, a repair is fabrication rather than a part number. The electrics are period Italian and the cooling system needs to be right before you sit in traffic with it. What owners consistently report is that a properly sorted car is tractable, will idle in town, pulls cleanly from low revs, and is far less temperamental than its value leads people to assume.