Ferrari 288 GTO

Leonardo Fioravanti drew it at Pininfarina, and the trick was making a substantially different car read as a 308. It keeps the silhouette and the pop-up headlights and almost nothing else. The wheelbase is 110mm longer, the front track is up 99mm and the rear 102mm, the body is 190mm wider, and because the rear overhang was cropped the whole car is 5mm shorter than the 308 it impersonates. Three louvred slots sit behind each rear wheel arch, a direct quotation of the 1962 250 GTO whose name the car had borrowed. The engine cover is heavily louvred and hinged at its trailing edge rather than at the front, which is the wrong way round for a Ferrari and entirely deliberate. Four rectangular driving lamps sit under the front bumper, the mirror stalks stand high and body-coloured, and the only brightwork anywhere is the brushed alloy grille and the GTO badge. Inside, the seats are Kevlar-framed in the Daytona pattern and tilt forward for engine access, the instrument faces are orange rather than the 308's white, and there is no boot at all: the fuel cells and cooling fans have taken the space.

No 288 GTO has ever started a race, and the reason is a category that collapsed underneath it. Group B was a homologation class covering circuits as well as rallying, and Ferrari built to its 200-car road requirement with a 2,855cc engine chosen so that the 1.4 turbocharged equivalence factor landed it at 3,997cc, just inside the 4.0-litre ceiling. Homologation came through on 1 June 1985. The circuit series then failed to happen. Group C prototypes had the entries and the manufacturers, Group B endurance racing did not, and Ferrari let the programme go. The rally side destroyed itself instead, and the fatalities of 1986 led the FIA to suspend the category at the end of that season. The competition car itself was finished and real. Michelotto built five Evoluziones plus a prototype, taking the same V8 to 650bhp at 7,800rpm in a car of roughly 940kg with a claimed 225mph, and Ferrari never even submitted it for homologation. What the programme became instead was a rolling development exercise, and on 10 June 1986 Enzo Ferrari asked his engineers to turn that hardware into a road car for the company's fortieth birthday.

The 288 GTO's cultural life is quieter than the F40's and more interesting for it. Ferrari took a name it had used exactly once before, on the 1962 250 GTO, and then never badged this car 288 at all. It was sold as the GTO. The 2.8-litre eight-cylinder shorthand was an internal factory designation that the press and owners adopted to keep the two apart, and it stuck so completely that Ferrari's own model pages now have to explain it. Three Formula 1 drivers of the era bought one: Niki Lauda, Michele Alboreto and Keke Rosberg. Lauda's was the last car built and is generally understood as Enzo Ferrari's peace offering after their falling-out, which gives the model an ending most cars do not get. In games it has been a Forza fixture across the main series and turns up as the fourth barn find in Forza Horizon 2, but it has nothing like the F40's reach. It was never on a bedroom wall in 1984, largely because almost nobody outside the hobby knew it existed.

The 288 GTO rewards use and punishes standing, which is the same lesson the F40 and F50 teach and it is sharper here because there are fewer cars. Turbochargers and their plumbing suffer more from sitting than from mileage: seals dry out, hoses perish, and the first sign is oil smoke under boost or a whistle that has changed character. The rubber fuel cells are the scheduled item that defines the car. They have a finite life whatever the odometer says, and replacing them on a car this rare is planned expenditure rather than a surprise. Belts are an engine-out job, which is why sensible owners have everything else convenient done at the same time and why the invoices run to five figures. The clutch is a consumable behind a 400bhp turbo V8. The bodywork is the other reality. Glassfibre, Kevlar and Nomex panels bonded to a steel frame are light and strong and are not steel, so repair is specialist work and a bad one hurts the value permanently. None of it is mysterious. Forty years of specialist attention has documented every failure mode this car has.