Ferrari 250gto

The seven letters of the name ‘Ferrari’ (рис. 19) produce a quickening of the pulse for any car enthusiast. If you're a dedicated Ferrari fan however, just the three letters GTO are all it takes to get the adrenaline pumping. To the devoted, everything else is just a little ordinary by comparison; even the F40s, Berlinetta Boxers and 275GTBs. The GTO is THE Ferrari -and perhaps THE car of all time. Why is the GTO so special? There are several compelling reasons.

Рис. 19

Firstly, the GTO helped Ferrari win three World Championships in a row from 1962 to 1964. Yet it was a real rarity, a racer that could be driven on the road. On top of that, only 39 were ever made. That makes the 250GTO ultra-desirable whichever way you care to look at it.

To understand the GTO, car enthusiasts have to realise why it was conceived. Racing during the 1950s had become very much faster and consequently more dan­gerous. The death of 82 people at Le Mans in 1955 was the catalyst which split top-flight racing into categories. One of these was the new grand tourer class, which required that cars should have closed coupe bod­ies which resembled to a large degree those of the manufacturer's road cars. A minimum of a hundred exam­ples of each of these race cars had to be built.

By the beginning of the 1960s, Enzo Ferrari's were dominant in racing, so he took the new class very seriously. He certainly faced some stiff competition from the Aston Martin DB4 Zagato and the new Jaguar E-Type. Ferrari's competitor was the 250GT, the first volume-produced Ferrari. It used the same basic chas­sis as that of the 166, first seen in 1947, which pro­vided excellent handling. However, the 250GT was not strong on all-out speed.

Enzo thought that he could beat the opposition with a more powerful engine but Chief engineer Carlo Chiti argued that the car's blunt aerodynamics were at fault. He went to great pains to have a wind tunnel installed at Ferrari's HQ in Modena. The result was that the engine remained much the same as before: a glorious 3.0-litre V12 unit designed by Gioacchino Colombo. The size of each individual cylinder was 250cc, hence the ^'250' name. In specification, it mirrored the Testa Rossa pure racing car, including dry sump lubrication and six twin-choke Weber carburettors.

Ferrari developed a new five-speed, all-synchromesh gearbox but the chassis remained much as before but with a short wheelbase. The reasoning was the Ferrari face enough problems getting the car through the 100-car homologation rule without having to argue about the chassis as well. Standard 250GT suspension used coil springs at the front and the rigid axle with leaf springs at the back. Development engineer Giotto Bizzarrini wanted to up-rate the rear to coil springs as well but Enzo did not agree.

The new car arrived in February 1962 and was christened 250GTO, the magical letters standing for Gran Turismo Omologato. Each car was virtually hand-built, mostly for very wealthy private individuals who fancied their chances at a racing career. All GTOs were given odd chassis numbers (at a time when racing cars were traditionally allocated even numbers), which has given rise to some confusion over the exact number of GTOs built. However, most historians now agree on 39, a figure which fell way below the supposed Mini­mum' of 100. Each one was slightly different and some, like Bizzarrini's triplet of restyled ‘bread van’ GTOs were very different.

The styling was gorgeous, the work of Ferrari's own engineers. It made use of the Kamm tail principle, which yielded enhanced aerodynamics for cars with sloping tails. Overall, the GTO was 6.6in longer and 3.5in lower than the short wheelbase 250GT Berlinetta. Construction was very lightweight, with all-aluminium bodies created in the tiny Modena workshop of Sergio Scaglietti. The body styling would later change on the 1964 Series II to incorporate a notchback.

As a race car, the 250GTO was highly successful. From its first outings it proved its superiority over the opposition in endurance events and the World Cham­pionship. Phil Hill came second in the 1962 Sebring, the GTO's debut event. In the hands of drivers like Mike Parkes and the late, great Rodriguez brothers, it made Ferrari dominant on the track. In Class III of the 1962 championship, Ferrari GTOs won a crushing victory with maximum points - despite the Italian gi­ant not having an official works team.

Its only competition came from the lightweight Jaguar E-Type (from 1963) and the AC Cobra (from 1964).

A single 4.0-litre GTO was developed and raced by Parkes and Mairesse at the 1962 Nurburgring 1000km. It finished second but came off at Mulsanne at Le Mans later in the year. Ferrari scored a spectacular suc­cess at the 1962 Paris 1000km, occupying the first six places, four of which were GTOs. Many other drivers raced GTOs, including such illustrious names as Graham Hill, Innes Ireland and Roger Penske.

Not only was the GTO a racing success, it could also be used on the road. As expected, handling and raw performance were exemplary. Car enthusiasts might not, however, have expected it to be a tractable and usable machine, especially in town - but it was.

The downside (from the point of view of someone wanting to use it as a road car) was difficult brak­ing, uncomfortable accommodation, droughts and the sheer level of noise.

The 250GTO was the last of a long line of great front-engined racing Ferraris. By 1963, the mid-engined 250LM had arrived and would show the way ahead: its potential for ultimate handling balance tended to place it ahead of the GTO. The new car would effectively have rendered the GTO obsolete immedi­ately, but racing officials refused to sanction it be­cause too few had been made to satisfy homologation.

There were also several ‘pseudo’ GTOs, such as the ‘bread vans’ built by Piero Drogo and Giotto Biz-zarrini, and Count Volpi's converted 250GT, which did battle with genuine GTOs on the track. They had little success.

Today the really fanatical Ferrari collector simply must have a GTO in his or her garage. However, that person will certainly need to be extraordinarily rich: the going price for a 250GTO is around the L2.5 million mark. For that a car enthusiast could buy seven brand-new Ferrari F50s. In Britain, several mu­sic business personalities have bought GTOs, though the cars are very seldom seen in public because of their stratospheric value.

One side-effect of this situation has been the widespread replication of the GTO. Quite a few stan­dard 250GT Ferraris have been butchered over the years to make replicas. Some have even been passed off as original, a process encouraged by the confusion over chassis numbers. More recently (in 1984), the GTO name was revived for another very special homologation car, the mid-engined 288GTO - but that, as they say, is an­other story.