Ferrari Testarossa

When Ferrari unveiled the Testarossa in 1984, it replaced the Berlinetta Boxer and carried forward that car's defining feature: a mid-mounted flat-12. The name, Italian for 'red head,' revived a badge Ferrari had used on earlier competition engines and pointed to the red-painted cam covers sitting atop the twelve cylinders. Pininfarina wrapped the mechanicals in a body that grew dramatically wide at the rear, where deep side strakes fed air to radiators relocated from the nose to the flanks. Those strakes became the car's signature, endlessly imitated and impossible to mistake.

Beneath the engine cover sat a 4.9-liter, 48-valve flat-12 rated at around 380 horsepower, driving the rear wheels through a five-speed manual and giving a top speed near 180 mph. That made the Testarossa one of the fastest road cars Ferrari had built to that point. Production of the original ran from 1984 to 1991, accounting for 7,177 of the roughly 9,939 cars built across all three iterations; the 512 TR and F512 M followed before the line closed in 1996.

More than its specifications, the Testarossa endures as a cultural artifact. It arrived as the definitive exotic of the 1980s, its wedge profile and slatted flanks fixed in the public imagination by the television series Miami Vice and the arcade game Out Run. For a generation of enthusiasts, the poster on the bedroom wall was a Testarossa. That status has kept it prominent among collectors long after faster Ferraris arrived.