The legendary 250 GTO
As Ferrari plots a transformative five years, we examine the car that more than any other has shaped the last 60
The 250 GTO was both the last of its breed and a model for Ferrari’s future. It was the last front-engined Ferrari sports racer and the pinnacle of Maranello’s front-engined V12 genre. And yet, 60 years on, every subsequent front-engined Ferrari is in essence a direct development of the GTO.
It was a car of contradictions. Today it stands as one of the most valuable of all classics. Until the recent record-breaking Mercedes sale, the most money ever paid for a car – $70 million or £52 million – was for a GTO, back in 2018. Yet Enzo Ferrari made only 39 out of a promised production run of 100 units, the minimum number needed for GT racing homologation (the O stands for omologato). As part of the ruse, he skipped chassis numbers to give the illusion of quantity. It went on to be one of the most successful sports racers of the early ’60s, as well as probably the most beautiful and certainly the most desirable.
The 250 GTO is also, to this day, the most special Ferrari to drive.
Its birth was a difficult one. Eight key staff, including chief engineer Giotto Bizzarrini and chief designer Carlo Chiti, walked out in November 1961 while the car was in its final stages of development. Bizzarrini and Chiti then founded a new (short-lived) Ferrari rival, ATS, which included an F1 team.
It was the most troubled time in the (at that point) 15-year history of Ferrari. To finish the development of what would become the GTO, Enzo Ferrari turned to his junior engineers. ‘We got rid of the generals,’ he told the wet-behind-the-ears youngsters.
‘Now you corporals must take charge.’
Into the breach as chief engineer stepped Mauro Forghieri, just 27 when the GTO was unveiled at Maranello in February 1962. Soon after, he was appointed technical director of Scuderia Ferrari and remained in charge until 1984. His cars won four world drivers’ titles, most famously for Niki Lauda in 1975 and 1977.
Forghieri refined Bizzarrini’s GTO design, Stirling Moss helped with the development work, and it was clothed in a spectacularly beautiful body, the work of Sergio Scaglietti. A month later, the GTO made its competition debut at the 12 Hours of Sebring in Florida, convincingly beating the E-Types, Corvettes and Porsches in the GT class, and finishing second outright behind a Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa racer. A few months later it won the GT class at Le Mans, finishing second and third overall.
