Ferrari 308, 328 and 348

The Complete Story

Robert Foskett

• Verlag: Crowood
• Jahr: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781847978868
• Thema: Technologie et ingénierie
• Thema: Transport et ingénierie de l'automobile

Ferrari 308, 328 and 348 traces the complete story of the four models of Ferrari's V8-powered sports cars between 1973 and 1995 - the cars that broke Ferrari out of the V6 and V12 moulds, with the V8 becoming Ferrari's most popular engine choice in the final decade of the twentieth century. The book covers the history and development of Ferrari's new V8 engine, and the 308's daunting role as successor to the popular Dino. There are specification tables and production figures for the model variants, along with details of concept cars and other related models, and a review of competition exploits. The book also considers the cars' current position in the classic car market and offers insight into the rewarding ownership experience each of the models now represents.The book covers: design processes and styling by Bertone and Pininfarina; concept cars and rivals; the cars in competition; owning and running the cars today. With a guide through the entire lifespan of these exciting V8-powered sports cars and superbly illustrated with 295 colour photographs, this is essential reading for the Ferrari aficionado.

CHAPTER ONE

A BRIEF HISTORY OF FERRARI

Scuderia Ferrari came into existence on 1 December 1929, to operate as Alfa Romeo’s factory-sanctioned racing team. This small but highly professional ensemble was entrusted with the honour of preparing Alfa Romeo’s P2 Grand Prix cars and a selection of 6C cars, in 1500 and 1750cc guises. It was also perfectly placed as the trusted factory partner to race prepare Alfa Romeos for wealthy private clients. In those early days, Enzo Ferrari quite literally lived over the shop, his race-preparation premises featuring an upper floor with a large balcony, where he set up home with his wife Laura.

The birth of his son Alfredo in 1932 was a momentous occasion, an event that would impact profoundly on the future of this ambitious racing driver, and would have equally dramatic repercussions on the factory that bore his name. New-found responsibility for his beloved son Alfredo – nicknamed Alfredino, thereafter often shortened to Dino – caused Ferrari to retire completely from the dangers of his now sporadic competition driving assignments, and to focus instead, with absolute intensity, on the management of his Modena-based fledgling racing stable.

Having himself been a racer, first for minor Italian manufacturer, CMN, then from 1920 with his beloved Alfa Romeo, Enzo Ferrari had learned how to motivate and manipulate the racing drivers in his team. But his influence extended far beyond driver coaching: Ferrari had a valuable knack for enticing the most capable people to collaborate with him – for example, while at Alfa Romeo, he had persuaded legendary engineer, Vittorio Jano, to defect from Lancia, a managerial feat rewarded richly with the many successes accrued by the dominant Alfa Romeo P2 Grand Prix car that Jano went on to create. Success followed success as Ferrari managed Alfa Romeo’s factory team: wins in Grands Prix, on the arduous Mille Miglia and breakneck Targa Florio races made the ‘cavallino rampante’ (‘prancing horse’) emblem synonymous with Alfa Romeo’s victorious racers.

The iconic Ferrari script, barely altered since 1946. JOHN DICKENS

But with war looming again, Alfa Romeo decided to bring their racing efforts in-house, and Ferrari soon found his new appointment as Director of Alfa Corse constricting. In 1939 he left Alfa Romeo to retake control of his own destiny, famously explaining ‘I’m keeping my bad habits and going back to my home town’ as he returned from bustling Milan to Modena, determined to make a new start.

Despite his new-found independence, Ferrari was not free in every sense, in that his settlement with Alfa Romeo prevented the eponymous naming of any cars he might devise for a period of four years. Even so, his automotive creativity would not be denied, and within a few months he had created a new car, and named it the Auto Avio Costruzione 815. Pragmatically constructed, the touring-bodied 815 was based on a cleverly re-engineered Fiat chassis powered by a 1.5-litre straight-8 motor, imaginatively borne out of a pair of recycled Fiat 4-cylinder engines. However, development of this promising new car was curtailed as World War II broke out: Allied bombing raids motivated a move to Maranello – a sleepy village that was home to just 600 people – and Ferrari’s factory then spent the hostilities engaged in building aeroplane engines and engineering equipment. Ferrari’s facilities by no means survived the war unscathed: his new factory was bombed twice before Italy surrendered to the Allies, but it remained viable and operational as hostilities concluded.

From small beginnings: Ferrari’s first solo foray into sports-car construction, the Auto Avio. JONATHAN TREMLETT

Ferrari 166 Inter. Ferrari’s first road and race cars powered by the V12 engine design. Initially of 1.5 litres, capacity was soon increased to 2.0 litres, making sense of this model’s designation. JONATHAN TREMLETT

The First Ferraris

Business soon flourished as Italy set to the task of rebuilding itself. Ferrari’s machine tools were much in demand, but thoughts of racing cars never left Ferrari’s fertile imagination. Alfa Romeo’s edict preventing Ferrari from fielding racers bearing his own name had expired as war raged, and now Scuderia Ferrari could be reborn: this time the cars that this famous stable would use to compete on the world’s stage would be unambiguously badged as Ferraris. Lofty ambition meant that this time, recycled Fiat components were unfitting, and Ferrari’s post-war efforts would be centred on a brand new engine, created by ex-Alfa Romeo engineer, Gioacchino Colombo. A V12, no less, would be installed in the first true Ferrari racer, the 1500cc 125 of 1947, a magnificent little machine that would prove victorious in only its second race.

Ferrari’s upstart would go on to win seven of the fourteen races in which it was entered that year, and the following year the engine received a stretch to 2000cc to power Ferrari’s evolution racer, the 166. This car won the Mille Miglia in 1948, and the following year grabbed the international limelight for the fledgling manufacturer by winning both Le Mans and Spa 24-hour races, astonishing successes at the highest sporting level for a marque barely two years old. The Scuderia’s first victory in Formula 1 arrived the following year, as Gonzales took the chequered flag at the British Grand Prix.

Road Cars

While the factory racers aspired to victory at the highest level, so ambitions grew for the road-going models Enzo Ferrari often suggested existed only to fund his team’s racetrack endeavours. Hand built in tiny volumes, the 166 and its successor the 195 would barely reach a production run of sixty cars in four years, but they whetted the appetite of the resurgent sports-car market for further Ferraris. Factory output doubled with the introduction of the 212 Inter, with eighty made in two years, but it would not be until 1955, with the introduction of the 250 Europa GT, that Ferrari at last would make road cars in meaningful numbers. While by no means mass produced, the Pininfarina-styled coupé could finally be offered to more discerning customers, and Ferrari’s reputation as the purveyor of performance cars for the road would approach that of the racing team.

One of the most beautiful of Pininfarina’s collaborations with Ferrari, the 250GT Lusso. STEFAN KOSCHMINDER

This early collaboration with Pininfarina would be the start of a long and fruitful partnership, as the famous carrozzeria gradually came to dominate road-car design at Maranello for almost two decades. The image-building 250 models would continue into the early 1960s, variations of essentially the same elements – engines, chassis and even bodywork – being adapted with success to both road and competition use. Many of the most famous Maranello racers could be ordered in street trim: the 250GT SWB (short-wheelbase) could be had with either lightweight aluminium alloy bodywork for the track or more durable steel for the rigours of road use. A selection of power outputs was also available for its 3-litre V12 motor.

As the early 1960s progressed it became clear that road-based race cars could no longer dominate on track, and more specialized machinery would be required if Ferrari were to continue to compete at the uppermost level, certainly in sports-car racing at such illustrious venues as Le Mans or Daytona. And so Ferrari’s road cars began to diverge from their competition-focused stablemates. Fast, comfortable, front-engined grand tourers became the order of the day, built in ever greater numbers – by 1965 the factory was producing 600 cars each year. Maranello’s road cars may still have shared a factory, a name and an evocative emblem with the Scuderia’s racers, but they now had relatively little in common with the mid-engined projectiles the competitions division fielded in the pursuit of glory. But the link between race and road car was not permanently broken: as the 1970s drew near, so road car designers, eager to provide enthusiast drivers with the most dynamic performance possible, began to look to the track for fresh mechanical inspiration.

FERRARI NUMBERING – DECIPHERING THE DIGITS

With a handful of exceptions, including the Lancia-derived Grand Prix designs campaigned between 1955 and 1957, few of Ferrari’s cars – either competition or road-going models – have been formally named, most being referred to by model number only. While some of the numbers selected as designations may appear random, they are generally descriptive and decipherable.

In the early days cars tended to be numbered in recognition of the cubic centimetre capacity of a single cylinder: a 250GT V12 motor therefore of 3 litres total capacity, and a 500 Testa Rossa from 1956 featuring a 4-cylinder 2-litre motor. From 1957, with the arrival of the Dino Formula Two racer, a new numbering scheme would come into effect, whereby the capacity of the engine in litres would prefix a number representing the count of its cylinders. So the 246 F1 Grand Prix car used by Mike Hawthorn to win the World Driver’s Championship in 1958 was propelled by a 2.4-litre V6 unit.

Confusingly, both numbering schemes ran in parallel for some time, the latter gradually gaining favour through the 1960s and 1970s. In 1981, with the turbocharged 126 Formula 1 racer, the competition cars abandoned the traditional numbering convention for good. Through the course of this decade, some of the road cars began to acquire names rather than numbers: Mondial and Testarossa were two early examples, and the F40 was christened in celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the company’s foundation.

Three-point 2 litres and 8 cylinders, indicated by Ferrari’s descriptive numbering scheme. PAWEŁ SKRZYPCZYŃSKI

More recently, numbering has become less standardized. Both 360 Modena and F430 model designations explain their respective 3.6- and 4.3-litre capacities but not cylinder count, while the earlier F355 was more meaningfully – if not consistently – numbered in recognition both of a 3.5-litre capacity and in the number of valves per cylinder its motor design featured. And the recent 612 Scaglietti may be a 12-cylinder car, but its capacity is 5.7 rather than 6 litres.

CHAPTER TWO

THE MID-ENGINE REVOLUTION

Ferrari was by no means the only iconic motor-racing constructor to write the opening chapter of its legend in 1946. In the same year that Colombo was hard at work creating Ferrari’s magnificent V12 engine, a small garage in Surbiton, Surrey, became the somewhat unlikely base from which Charles Cooper and his son John began work on a diminutive racing car, its small size belying its importance in terms of the future of Grand Prix racing. Cooper’s tiny 500cc JAP motorcycle-engined racer was mid-engined.

Mounting the powerplant behind the driver was certainly not a new idea: Porsche had chosen this layout for the mighty Nazi-backed AutoUnion Grand Prix cars of the 1930s, but it was a tricky layout to make work well with primitive tyres and unsophisticated ...