Yahoo Autos How the Ferrari 250 GTO Became a $70 Million Car
When it first appeared, the car had no name. But Ferrari staffers had taken to calling it “Il Mostro”—the monster—because of its strange looks. The date: August 11, 1961. The place: Monza. The racetrack’s sprawling grandstands were empty as technicians rolled this new Ferrari prototype into the pits under the watchful gaze of Giotto Bizzarrini, the genius designer and engineer who could take more credit than anyone else for getting the car this far. The vehicle had no paint, its tarnished aluminum body the color of an angry sky. Its front end looked particularly awkward, with intakes that made it look like it was gasping for air through a taught mouth and a trio of nostrils. A Belgian Ferrari team driver named Willy Mairesse hammered the engine and pulled the car out onto the track for its debut shakedown.
Bizzarrini was all nerves. The imperious boss Enzo Ferrari was expecting the new racing car to be a world-beater. Meanwhile, the driver Mairesse always put people on edge. Enzo’s deputy Franco Gozzi remembered: “Willy Mairesse had been involved in many shunts and became known as a car crasher.”
Remarkably, the vehicle was not a white-sheet design. Instead, it had been developed mostly from existing components. The chassis came directly from the 250 GT SWB, but the front-mounted engine had been moved lower and more midship, closer to the cockpit. The motor was the proven 3.0-liter V-12 from the Le Mans-winning Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa, the engine that more than any other had earned Ferrari a reputation for sophistication and victory. Enzo once said of this powerplant, “All we wanted to do was to build a conventional engine. Only one that would be outstanding.” Its 12 cylinders were the diameter of silver dollars and revved at such high rpm that the motor had become known—more than any other that had ever been built—for its song as well as its performance.
When members of the racing press got their first look at the new Ferrari, the reaction was unfavorable. One reporter called it “the anteater” because of its weird nose. The prototype might have looked ungainly, but one thing was clear: it was quick. Powerful, easy to drive, and loud as all hell.
Ferrari had never produced a car that, in its own way, was not outstanding, and there was no reason to believe this new vehicle would stand out more than its predecessors. No one could know at the time what we now know about this prototype. When fully developed, it would come to be called the Ferrari 250 GTO—250 for the cubic-centimeter displacement in each of the 12 cylinders, GT for gran turismo, and O for omolagato, the Italian word for homologation. Six Weber carburetors, roughly 300 hp, a new five-speed transmission to replace the four that Ferrari had been using for years, top speed of roughly 175 mph. Nearly 60 years after the debut shakedown at Monza, the GTO has become today the single most coveted automobile ever built, since Karl Benz made the first one in 1896. It was the last of the line of front-engine Ferrari racing cars, and the last Ferrari ever made that was not only a winner on the track, but also an easy-to-handle road car. Today, despite the tepid reaction of the press in the summer of ’61, the GTO consistently tops lists of hottest cars and greatest Ferraris of all time.
The most money ever paid for any car was more than $70 million, in 2018. It was a 1963 Ferrari 250 GTO. The most money ever paid for a car at auction was $48.4 million, that same year. It was a 1962 Ferrari GTO. Not every music fan can agree that “Stairway to Heaven” is history’s greatest rock song, nor will all sports fans agree that Muhammad Ali is history’s greatest athlete. But in the car world, the GTO has become the Greatest of All Time. The GOAT. And this fact is quantifiable, far and away, in dollars and cents.
What is often lost on the world today is the extraordinary story of how this car came into being, and the equally astounding story of how in recent years it has become an automobile worth more than mansions sitting on their own private islands.
At the time of the GTO’s first laps at Monza, Ferrari’s company was just over a dozen years old, founded in a bombed-out World War II factory in the village of Maranello, outside of Enzo’s hometown of Modena. During the 1950s, his race teams—both sports cars and Formula 1—had become preeminent, and he himself had become an enigma—elusive, eccentric, and feared. He was known as “the Magician of Maranello.” Though he was neither an engineer nor a designer (by his own assessment, he was an “agitator of men”), his racing and road cars had come to be the most exotic in existence, and they were embodiments of his particular genius. However, competition from the Brits—notably Aston Martin and Jaguar—was gaining, on the track and in desirability among rich clientele.
In 1961, as the GTO was being developed, the Ferrari racing team conquered Europe’s racetracks completely. Ferrari won Le Mans in June for the second year in a row, and by September two Ferrari drivers were gunning for the F1 world championship—the American Phil Hill and the West German libertine Count Wolfgang Von Trips, whose nickname was Count Von Crash. On September 10, 1961—one month after the GTO prototype’s first shakedown run—Phil Hill became the first and, to this day, only American-born F1 world champion. But on that same day, his teammate and rival Count Von Trips lost control of his car. The Ferrari scythed through a crowd of spectators. Von Trips was killed, along with 14 spectators.
Ferrari drivers had died in competition before. But unlike those accidents, Von Trips’ crash had been captured by a television camera. The footage shocked the world (and continues to: it has hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube). The next day’s front page of Italy’s biggest newspaper, the Corriere della Sera: “Fifteen Dead from the Tragedy at Monza. The Investigation Has Begun at the Autodrome.” Reporters were all but pounding on Enzo Ferrari’s office door. “You can’t imagine what it was like,” the late Phil Hill later recalled. “It seemed like everybody in the damn country was milling around Maranello, and there’s Enzo Ferrari, with three days’ beard growth, and wearing bathrobes all day.”
Over the next couple months, the stress of the bloodbath at Monza built, and in November it boiled over. Eight key men walked off the job in what is now known as the “Palace Revolt.” Among the departed was Giotto Bizzarrini, the lead engineer on the GTO (shortly after, Bizzarrini was hired by a tractor maker in nearby Bologna named Ferruccio Lamborghini to build a V-12 for his first car).
So during the final critical months of the GTO’s development, the Ferrari empire was collapsing; it was the most troubled time in the company’s short history. Ferrari had to move on with inexperienced talent. “We got rid of the generals,” he told these men. “Now you corporals must take charge.”
By the time the Ferrari 250 GTO debuted at its first official press conference—at the factory on February 24, 1962—a new chief engineer had taken over, Mauro Forghieri, just 26 years old. Il Monstro’s shape had been refined, and its aerodynamic Scaglietti-built body had become a thing of distinct beauty. Stirling Moss, arguably the greatest racing driver alive at the time, had helped with on-track development of the prototype. The price tag for the production car was $18,000 (about $153,000 in today’s dollars), and only buyers personally approved by Enzo would be allowed to pay for one. As it would turn out, only 39 would ever be built. (While this number is often disputed, the Ferrari factory today confirms it.)
On March 24, 1962, the GTO made its racing debut at the 12 Hours of Sebring, and today it’s easy to imagine this feast of sound and speed to be the dawning moment of the Golden Age of sports-car racing in America. The competition featured first-generation Corvettes, a Jaguar E-Type, various Porsches, MGs, Maseratis, one Ford Falcon, and a dozen Ferraris. The GTO won its class and placed second overall behind a Ferrari Testa Rossa, and from there on the new Ferrari began to steamroll the competition.
“I raced a lot with the GTO,” remembers Jean Guichet, now 92. “First as ‘private driver’ in 1962 and 1963, and then as an official driver for the Scuderia Ferrari in 1963 and 1964.” Guichet won Le Mans in the GT class (second overall) in the car’s debut at the Circuit de la Sarthe, and the following year he won the Tour de France and the Six Hours of Dakar in the GTO. “The GTO is one of the most beautiful racing cars ever made,” he recalls. “Fast and one of the only multi-purpose racing cars. The GTO was perfect whatever the conditions and the type of race.”
A few GTOs made it to America in 1962, through Ferrari’s U.S.-based distributor, the famous Luigi Chinetti, who sold them to fabulously rich, hand-picked Americans, per the Ferrari business model. “I drove the Ferrari GTO in four races in the early 1960s,” remembers Roger Penske, “racing for John Mecom, and we finished first overall or first in class in three of those races, so I certainly have great memories of that car. I remember it was a very powerful car, and it was a lot of fun to drive.”
When Carrol Shelby’s Cobras first arrived on the scene to take on the GTOs in 1963, the excitement captured the imagination of a new generation of race fans. One Shelby driver, Allen Grant, raced in both the Cobra and the GTO and is today uniquely qualified to compare the two.
“The Ferrari GTO was a very sophisticated, refined car, as opposed to the Cobra,” says Grant. “As we all know, the Cobra was a more simple car. It was a hot rod. The engine was extremely explosive. When you stepped on the gas, man, you better be ready as your back end would go flying. Whereas the Ferrari V-12, you stepped on the gas and it would go two-thousand, three-thousand, and at about 4000 rpm, all the sudden, it would accelerate faster. It came on smoothly and gradually. In corners, you would dirt track the Cobra. You came in hot, hit the apex and drifted all the way through. Whereas the Ferrari you drove conventionally. The Cobra had a production four-speed Borg Warner transmission. The Ferrari transmission was more precise. It was a gated five-speed. Click, click, click. Very refined.”
