Here’s a hypothetical: if I showed you a picture of a 1986 Ferrari Testarossa, what’s the first word that comes to mind? Cocaine. It’s obviously cocaine.
You can’t bring up the 1980s, or any particular, iconic relic from the 80s—like the Testarossa—without someone making some reference to cocaine. It’s usually a reference to how the designers of this thing were clearly railing booger sugar when they designed this thing. I kind of doubt that was actually the case, but when you look at how the Testarossa came to be, it’s not hard to believe. So much of it is ridiculous ideas and happy accidents built on top of them.
I’ll also admit that in researching this story, I did find some old newspaper articles about the shocking rise of cocaine use in Italy in the early 80s. Probably a coincidence, but that’s neither here nor there.
Back to the Testarossa—just look at it. It’s outrageous, and Ferrari didn’t even set out to make a deliberately ridiculous car—like, say, a certain other Italian car company down the road. That’s just how the cards fell with the Testarossa; it would’ve looked like that even without easy access to nose candy, but it sure—allegedly—helped pull it together into one of the most memorable sports car designs of all time.
I touched on this in my piece about the Ferrari F355 GTS: the Acura NSX was the first supercar that was also a good, you know, car. We take this for granted because we’ve been spoiled with even the wildest supercars being somewhat docile and ergonomically sound. But before this, exotic sports cars, for all their glitz, glamour, and gorgeousness, weren’t good cars in the sense we have now. The Testarossa is one of them—made all the more amusing because at the time, its mission statement and the entire reason why it looks so outlandish is because Ferrari was trying to build a better flagship that you could actually use like, you know, a car.
See, the Testarossa can trace its roots to the Berlinetta Boxer from 1973. It was a beautiful design that laid the groundwork for the next decade and change of Maranello style. It was also incredibly fast, using a mid-mounted flat 12-cylinder engine derived from their Formula 1 program. Despite the name, it is not a Boxer engine like the ones used in Porsches. Its chief designer even insisted on not calling it a Boxer, but Ferrari decided they needed that alliteration to sell the car. Maybe it was starting to snow in Italy already.
The BB, as it came to be known, had its share of significant issues as all old supercars did. Its cooling system had a nasty habit of cooling the enormous engine at the expense of its passengers, as the heat being transported from its midship-mounted engine to the front-mounted radiator would also radiate into the cabin, thus baking its occupants. And because the rear was full of a huge race engine and the front was full of water-cooling for the engine, there was nowhere for you to put anything—like a change of dry clothes, or a water bottle.
It also had very twitchy handling because of the huge engine hung out behind the cabin, so if you weren’t concentrating as a result of something like, let’s say heat stroke, you’d probably crash and die. The BB was a wonderful supercar, but as was so often the case at the time, it was also a pretty dreadful car. The Testarossa’s goal was to take that bipolar beast and make a superb car you could use that was still a proper Ferrari.
To create cargo space in the frunk and behind the driver, Ferrari stretched the wheelbase, then split the radiator in two and moved them right behind the doors. This resulted in the comically thick hips, creating room for the radiators next to the already unconventionally wide engine—the Testarossa being so much wider in the rear helped tame its handling, too. It was fed cool air by huge intake ports carved into the body; they were originally supposed to be subtly integrated into the bodywork, but American safety rules dictated those intakes couldn’t be wide open lest they ingest a child. So, they had to be blocked off to some degree.
Rather than compromise or fight it, Pininfarina chief designer Leonardo Fioravanti decided to lean into it and make a statement. He threw subtlety out the window with the now-iconic “cheese grater” strakes that dominate the Testarossa’s profile. The rear end is similarly riddled with horizontal lines and strakes in the name of ventilating the engine’s heat, executed in a way that almost feels scandalous. You can just barely catch a glimpse of its titular “red head” engine from certain angles, even with everything closed and heat visibly radiating from every orifice. Trying to open the engine cover after the Testarossa has been running for quite some time feels like reaching into the sun.
The Testarossa is big, low, wide, and dramatic. Its aggressive styling was a very controversial break from tradition in its day, but went on to become one of the most iconic designs ever stamped into reality. It’s a blend of a very classically feminine silhouette, with its exaggerated hips and flowing buttresses, accentuated by lascivious, lewd details in its intake strakes and angular lines; an elegant form framed by an aggressive cocktail dress. It’s intimidating, and almost more intimidating that all this wild style is not theatrics, but actual function. The car had to be this way.
The Testarossa doesn’t feel any less intimidating once you step in. This was supposed to be a luxurious Ferrari. Don’t get me wrong, it’s almost entirely trimmed in French-stitched leather, but you still have to contend with a floor-mounted array of controls that are completely unintelligible. The driving position leaves a lot to be desired, feeling as if you need long arms and short legs. On top of that, the pedal box is canted inward, so you’re forced to sit at an angle. There’s so little room in the footwell that if you’re not wearing tight shoes and have small feet, you will be operating the gas and brake at the same time. By the end of the day, I saw a little groove cut into my Chucks from grazing the brake pedal all day.
A twist of the unusual, pivoting key awakens the mighty and mightily weird engine from its slumber. It takes on the demeanor of a petulant teenager; it hates being woken up, idling miserably until it’s had a long time to warm up its 15-litre oil sump and come to grips with reality. [Same. —Ed.] Its convoluted throttle linkage creates a sticky pedal that is physically incapable of responding to a delicate touch. You have to repeatedly stab it whilst slipping the heavy clutch to get it to move smoothly, in the style of an old race car. This has the side effect of making you look every bit as obnoxious as the car does.
The big flat-12, for all its eccentricities, is actually quite a lovely motor once its shaken off its morning malaise. It displaces 4.9 litres, produces 385 horsepower at 6,300 rpm, and 361 pound-feet of torque at 4,500 rpm. All those figures were impressive for the day, but not Earth-shattering. Rather than outright speed, the figures point to an engine that’s relatively under stressed. As such, it loves to rev but doesn’t need to; in contrast to the style of the car its tasked with motivating, it’s almost docile.
There’s quite a bit of noise just from the size and scope of the machinery involved, but the Testarossa is by no means shouty. I’d almost be inclined to call it quiet—much quieter than any of the modern supercars I’ve spent time with, and it’s as smooth as any of them by the sheer merit of having 12 cylinders. There’s just enough authority in its exhaust bassline, backed up by a snarling intake that’s very audible from outside the car, to remind you and everyone around this is not a normal machine. As if that wasn’t obvious enough.
There’s more abnormality to the Testarossa that’s very apparent. The shifter is a dogleg layout, with first being where you’d expect to find second, doesn’t feel as weird as you’d expect, but bears mentioning. More strange than the layout is the linkage, guided by its gates, requiring a practiced and deliberate action to overcome its stiff, awkward, and notchy action. The clutch is actually quite easy to modulate if you have the calf strength to keep it up; once you’re underway, you’ll find that the gears are long. First seems long enough to take the place of most cars’ second gear—probably why the dogleg doesn’t feel so out-of-place.
There’s also the issue of the “Monospecchio” mirror. For the first two years of the Testarossa’s life, you had only one mirror—mounted high up on the driver’s A-pillar—to help you see around you. Visibility actually isn’t bad, but the Testarossa’s buttresses perfectly hide the massive rear hip on the far side, though the mirror perfectly displays the buttress and hip on the near side. Backing into a tight spot? Good luck with that, and there’s no power steering, either. Changing lanes? Better to just drive faster so you know no one’s there.
Driving faster is what this car is all about. Ferrari may have gone to significant length to make a less-completely-unusable supercar, but the Testarossa still a Ferrari. It’s a born-and-bred opera singer that only experiences joy when performing. Unlike some V12s, which are notoriously tricky to tune acoustically, the Testarossa always sounds delicious, but it’s downright delectable when you cram your right foot on the skinny pedal—try not to graze the brakes—and let it wail.
From about 3,000 rpm and onwards, the tone shifts, going up a vocal range into a tenor. It projects more and more power, making the hairs on the back of your neck stand up as it climbs to its 7.000 rpm redline. It takes a breath while you hurriedly click-clink into the next gear, then begins another tidal wave of speed and sound. It’s not the quickest car—an ND Miata would probably dust it off the line at a light—but on the highway, the Testarossa is relentless. It holds impossibly long and strong chords all the way up to nearly 300 km/h. If the owner is reading this, I didn’t verify that.
The Testarossa handles itself fairly well, albeit with caveats. At nearly 3,700 pounds, it’s a heavy car, and it rolls on relatively skinny tires—by modern standards, at least—even if they were considered comically huge back then. The packaging of the flat-12 engine means the Testarossa’s centre of gravity isn’t ideal, as the engine is mounted high so the transaxle can live underneath it. There’s a lot working against the Testarossa, but its double wishbone suspension and six coilovers do a brilliant job making the most of it.
At speed, the Testarossa feels like it stands up on its tippy toes, almost delicate in where it places its wheels. The bicep-assisted steering is agreeable once underway, and talkative like only a manual rack can be. The Testarossa is geared a little on the relaxed side, requiring an armful to heave around a tight corner, but there’s an astonishing amount of grip from the nose and finesse from the rear. In a way, the Testarossa is lovely; demanding in its physicality for sure, but in a way that’s more invigorating than draining.
To Ferrari, the Testarossa was intended to be a flagship and luxurious gran-tourer—and against its most obvious direct competitor, the Lamborghini Countach, it was. But compared to pretty much anything built after the first NSX, it’s a bit of a disaster, instead surviving the test of time on style points. This was well before Ferrari figured out how to make a good car, but to its credit, this particular Testarossa is hardly a bad car. I didn’t cook in the cabin, I had somewhere to put my camera gear, I didn’t go deaf, my spine hadn’t shattered, none of my limbs cramped up, and everything actually worked. That’s not bad now, yet was an impossibly high bar to clear in its era. Besides, if you wanted opulence back then, you bought a Mercedes.
Either way, the 1986 Ferrari Testarossa is an icon. A bizarre icon that represents a duality, appearing to be all about drug-fuelled flash and fashion, but in reality is simply form following function. It was always going to be this way, looking like an exaggerated caricature of a car, whether there were white lines inspiring the cooling lines or not. I had the enormous privilege of driving this car on multiple occasions, and I’m so thankful I did—the Testarossa requires a lot of getting-used-to. Once you are used to it—once you understand it, giving it the care and respect it demands—you’ll find its driving experience deserves to be remembered every bit as much as its style.
