Ferrari Fridays - Testarossa

A silhouette so iconic that the car doesn’t need to wear a nameplate to be instantly recognisable. One of the most aggressively handsome cars ever to touch tarmac, with the heart of a Le Mans race car. It was inevitable that we were going to HAVE to discuss Ferrari’s absolute phenomenon, the Testarossa.

There’s a lot to be said for car that is named after a companies most iconic series of race cars. Certainly, there is a lot for it to live up to. Cues to this effect are scattered across the car, ranging from the immense 385bhp version of the 4.9 L flat-12 derived from the 512BB LM, which sits just behind the pilot’s head, to the centre-locking, single bolt style wheels, reminiscent of an F1 car.

Blistering 0-60 times and incredible design only tell half the story of this particular Cavallino Rampante. The effect the car had on popular culture at the time of its release was world-shattering. If you were labelled a yuppie, and you didn’t own a Porsche 911 Turbo, you owned one of these. It didn’t matter what your favourite type of music was, everyone from Elton John to Rod Stewart drove one, so your favourite singer was sure to be motoring down Rodeo Drive in it. Whether your favourite Michael was Jackson, Jordan or Tyson, they all had one. Gerhard Berger made it his “downtime” car. It even basically got a staring role in Miami Vice. Truly it became one of the first status symbols of the 1980s. To this day, it remains the symbol for all things vapourwave, retro, OutRun-ish and corporately hedonistic.

Ferrari refused to waste such a good thing too – it received two further model updates in the forms of both the 512TR, now developing 422hp, and the final F512M, making 434hp. So good was this final form that Ferrari published the 0-100 (10.2 seconds) times before the 0-60 in the brochure, as it wasn’t felt that the 0-60s gave the complete picture of the sheer force behind the car.

Truly, a car that was born an icon, lived as an icon, and died as an icon too.