Yahoo Finance I Have a Huge Soft Spot for the Ferrari Testarossa
My friend John in Missoula, Montana, owns a 2008 Ferrari F430 Spider and two classic Fiats-more fun than a bucket of frogs, which not many persons have ever said about Fiats. John stashes his cars in a warehouse, as do a score of other collectors. When I first walked in, I faced an aromatic funk from car to car that encompassed about 50 years of my enthusiasm: lacquer, leather, Castrol, fresh rubber, cleaning fluid, wax, and rotten Mr. Gaskets. Package that smell and you could sell it to 9 or 10 people. Anyway, here's what also greeted me: three Bugatti Veyrons, one with an alleged $100,000 worth of Gulf Oil orange-and-powder-blue paint; a maroon Ferrari LaFerrari sucking on its custom Ferrari-badged trickle charger; a matching pair of Porsche 911 GT2 RSs; a 2017 Ferrari F12tdf in greenish gray; a 2016 McLaren 675LT; and a Ferrari 575GTZ Zagato that I blessed in a previous column, pleated avocado leather and all.
Then there was some moldy crap that no one cared about: a 50s-era Mercedes 300SL, supposedly the first shipped to America; two De Tomaso Panteras, one an ex–Jackie Stewart car; a '57 Ferrari 250GT California Spider prototype reportedly worth $10 million; a '69 Dodge Charger Daytona previously owned by David Spade; a '64 Porsche 904 Carrera GTS into which I tried to fold myself and failed; a purple '70 Monteverdi Hai 450SS (yep, it's a Hemi); and a RENNtech Benz E60, a car I think I drove for C/D from RENNtech's Florida shop to Myrtle Beach, where it shucked a belt. That's where I learned to hate boiled peanuts. And, as I mentioned earlier, my pal also owns a '67 Fiat Dino, the one with the Ferrari V-6, and a '58 Fiat 1200 TV, both of which I will swindle out of him shortly, a stratagem he has already surmised.
But the car in the warehouse I most wanted to drive was a 1990 Ferrari Testarossa with only 4000 miles on the clock. I harbor inestimable sentimental attachment to the TR after driving a 512TR from SoCal to New Jersey, the home of Ferrari North America. The company attached no deadline, so I whooshed along country roads for two weeks, once getting stopped by border guards near Nogales, Arizona. The subsequent cargo inspection took roughly four seconds. That car rode on Pirelli P Zeros, the first 18-inchers we'd ever seen on a production car. There was no spare. Instead, the owner's manual suggested, "In order to ensure safe travel, it is imperative that the tires are kept in excellenition [sic] . . . the tire ages event [sic] if it is used or not used at all." I did all of that.
So here I am, 26 years later, again wheeling a Testarossa, all scarlet strakes and whale-fin turning vanes, this time through Montana's Lolo National Forest. Of the TR's quirks, I'd forgotten the motorized-mouse seatbelts; the unassisted steering (feeling a lot like a current Alfa 4C's); the absence of ABS; that the view forward revealed not one cubic centimeter of the car's prodigious nose; that the handbrake was as intractable as a parole officer; that the plastic eight-ball shifter consistently resisted Gate Number Two; and that what I thought was the fuel gauge was instead the temperature gauge. A half-tank of gas no matter how far I drove! On my original TR journey, I was interviewed by a newspaper reporter in Olney, Illinois, simply because I'd nosed the Testarossa into the town's civic park. I was looking for albino squirrels.
Too many hacks, me especially, have extolled the sound of 12-cylinder Ferraris, but the boxer is an aural indulgence that Dave Grohl could fashion into a teen anthem. It's a raspy, gruff but resonant smoker's cough, morphed into three-part harmony by the somehow soothing whir of gears and accessory belts. Two Porsche 911 air-cooled sixes in concert. I left the windows lowered all afternoon. Bugs flew in. Big Montana bugs.
Accompanying me was not John but a warehouse employee, 21 years old, already possessing one of the best jobs ever, the little prick. He is, however, devoted. On his upper-left thigh is the tattooed outline of the Nürburgring, and on his right buttock is a tat that says Enzo in Ferrari's font, the outcome of a lost bet over an F1 race. I told him someday a lover will ask, "So, uh, how long did you date this Enzo person?"
My recent drive in the TR was unexpected because I'd expected so little. The car is heavy, and its engine in 1990 produced only 380 horsepower, slightly less than my Toyota Tundra's. No matter. The boxer's powerband remains as flat as cold-rolled steel, the platform is a vault, and the metallic jingle-jangle of each gearshift reminds me of liquor bottles tumbling inside the mini bar I knocked over at the Hotel Maranello Palace. You know what isn't upside down all these years later? The TR. In fact, it's excellenition.
From the December 2018 issue
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