Late last year, John Krewson drove a Ferrari 288 GTO for R&T's 51 Coolest Cars of the Last 50 Years. The piece he wrote was published in the March/April issue, but that's not the whole story—Executive Editor Sam Smith went with him and also got to drive the car. His brief thoughts are below. This isn't a standard review or even a quick drive piece, as we didn't get that much time in the car and the roads weren't the greatest. This is just a snapshot of what it's like to spend time with one of the coolest Ferraris ever built.
We showed up to drive both an F40 and a 288 GTO. The F40 was broken—this is apparently quite common with F40s—and needed some part to start, and said part was not available in time. But the 288 ran. ("The 288 always runs," said the owner. Of course it does.) I was a little disappointed, but really, I wasn't that disappointed. How can you be cranky when the consolation prize is still fantastic? How do you solve a problem like "Wah, My Ferrari Drive Today Will Be Merely Amazing Instead of Mind-Dorkingly Transcendental?"
You don't. You shut up, you love it, you play with the clackety shift gate at stoplights and giggle softly, because 288 GTO.
This is an interesting car. The 288 was built to take Ferrari into the Group B rally championship, the balls-out FIA class that produced cars like the Ford RS200, the Lancia 037, and the Renault 5 Turbo. Group B cars were mean, feisty things, all motor and short of wheelbase. They were amazing, fast, deeply functional. Also, they killed people. They represent one of the last great leaps of modern motorsport—one of the last moments where speed outweighed reason.
Group B was canceled before the 288 saw factory-backed competition, so Ferrari simply carried on producing the car. It was a homologation special that never homologated anything. From 1984 to 1985, you could buy one of these things and rest assured in the knowledge that you were driving something batshit in a time when Ferrari did not do batshit. It did art, occasionally slow, not always pretty, not always dramatic. The 288 was not slow, nor was it ugly. It was basically an ingot of pure drama dipped in a coat of absurdity and turbo lag.
Chiefly, it didn’t seem that weird. To a layman, the 288 looks like a mildly tweaked 308 GTB. It is not. Its 2.8-liter, 400-hp twin-turbo V-8 is mounted fore-aft; the 308's naturally aspirated eight is mounted transversely, or left-right. The chassis was made from steel tubes, with a few Kevlar-fiberglass honeycomb panels; the 308 was essentially an ordinary unibody. (Stretching the definition of ordinary, but still.) And the 288 went 189 mph. This was enough to make it the fastest production car on earth until the Porsche 959 came along, but the GTO's purpose wasn't straight-line speed. It was built to rip through the woods on dirt roads with two determined, possibly imagination-free people sitting inside.
But enough details. We pulled the car out of the garage, someone started it, and it sat there, idling. Unlike most Ferraris, 288s don't howl or grunt or snort. They just kind of whoosh and groan and produce sexy Italian steamship noises. Idling, a 288 sounds like a very pretty washing machine with a sore throat. And you don't mind, because you're standing there staring at the fender vents and wondering how big your balls have to be to haul ass through the forest in something like this.
I drove the car for around 15 minutes, and I have an answer: massive. The turbo lag is manageable, and the car feels smaller than it is. This is partly because the blackened cockpit seems to shrink around you, partly because the A-pillars are tiny and lean up toward your head and the roof feels like an ill-fitting hat. But you drive, and you drive, and you drive, and you start to think that the car is just an odd little 308. The pedals are strangely shaped and in a weird place. The steering wheel is old-school Italian, angled up and too far away unless you set the seat close to it, at which point the pedals are essentially in your lap. The power delivery is predictable, easy, but laggy enough that the car feels faster than 400 hp. You become comfortable with it, and then you toe a bit too much into the boost and it turns into a tail-happy weirdo with far too much soul and this kind of grumbling exhaust note that just begs you to do silly things.
You don't do silly things, of course, unless you own the car. The average 288 is worth around $1 million. But you think about it.
A lot.
John Krewson loves the four square lights in the 288's nose. I don't. Honestly, I don't even like the way the 288 looks. It's too period in places but not "disco" enough in others, to borrow a term from the Brits. And the GTO name bugs me, even if it's sort of right—to me, the GTO is one car, the 250, and no more. But Jesus H. Tapdancing Fark. This thing is great. It's friendly but eminently fearsome, drivable but perfectly involving. I want. I want, I want, I want.
STRAY OBSERVATIONS
by Sam Smith
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