BLOODLINE

From ’60s Daytona through to today’s 812 Superfast, Ferrari has offered an unrivalled series of front-V12 powered super-GTs. We drive five of the best

- STUART GALLAGHER

IN 1968, THE NEWLY LAUNCHED FERRARI 365 GTB4 ‘Daytona’ was the fastest production car in the world. It had 347bhp and stormed on to 280kmph. Today, the 812 Superfast has almost 800bhp and does 340kmph but is far from being the fastest production car in the world. It’s a small illustration of how the automotive landscape has changed in the last 50 years, though there are a few constants, and one of them is Ferrari’s devotion to the V12 engine.

The V12 is an unbroken engineering thread woven right through the history of the Modenese company, starting with its first car, the 125 S of 1947. That was fitted with a 1.5-litre V12, the first of the legendary Colombo line, and there has been a V12 in the line-up ever since. Well, technically there has, and we’ll come to that, because it has a part to play in this feature comparing Ferrari’s best GTs of the last half century.

Remarkably, the 60-degree V12 designed by Gioacchino Colombo back in the ’40s is the same as that fitted to the Daytona… in principle. In fact, not a single component is shared, the gradual upsizing over the intervening 20 years resulting in a whole new iteration that boasted four camshafts and a swept volume of 4.4 litres, or a little over 365cc per cylinder to be precise. So the description of the car was there in the original 365 GTB4 name, the numbers describing the engine (the trailing 4 denotes the camshaft count) and the letters the type of car: GT for Gran Turismo, B for Berlinetta. But Daytona has a ring to it.