1970s FERRARI 365 GT4 BB - 188mph

Our first Ferrari entry here was not only the fastest car of the 1970s (based on the factory's own claim of 188mph), but a significant one because it marked the start of a mid-engined era for Maranello's 12-cylinder, two-seater cars that was to endure for nearly a quarter of a century.

The stars had clearly aligned when Ferrari introduced the prototype 365GT4 BB at the 1971 Turin Salon. There was already precedent for its decision to go mid-engined, with the 1967 Dino 206 (and later 246) so configured. And it would have been impossible for Ferrari to ignore that its four-year-old, front-engined 365GTB/4 Daytona had always been head-to-head with Lamborghini's mid-engined Miura, then the epitome of advanced automotive engineering.

It wasn't as if a Ferrari with a 12-cylinder motor mounted amidships was a new concept. The benefits in terms of sharper handling and superior aerodynamics of an engine located aft of the cockpit had been proved since 1964 in Maranello's 512 racer. It also pioneered a new engine design: Ferrari was the first car maker to employ a 'flat', or horizontally opposed, 12-cylinder unit, the packaging of which would have been impractical in a front-engined racer.

When the production-ready 365 Berlinetta Boxer arrived in 1973, this technology was fully embraced. In effect a wide-angled vee, with 180° separating each bank of cylinders, its all-new 4.4-litre flat-12 produced a solid 380bhp at 7200rpm and 301lb-ft of torque at 3900rpm. It was a wide unit, but the configuration kept mass lower down in the chassis, although with its transaxle mounted below, beside the wet-sump (a dry sump didn't appear until the later 512BB), that advantage was never fully exploited.