A Brief History of Ferrari Supercars, From the 288 GTO to the F80

Most terms in the automotive world have fixed definitions: a spark plug, a station wagon, etc.

A few, however, are a bit more slippery. At the tail end of the last millennium, the fastest, most powerful road cars went by a magnificent superlative: supercar. Here in the 21st Century, though, that name apparently seems banal; the term has found itself spread far and wide to describe any road car of a certain type of design and level of performance, no matter where in the lineup it lies, Nowadays, we call most machines at the top of the charts a hypercar.

But at the end of the day, the supercars of the 20th Century and the hypercars of today are the same thing: the tip of the spear for a car company, their greatest achievement of the era. The difference in names is an arbitrary decision, but by the standards of their respective decades, they mean the same thing.

For the purposes of this story, we’ll use the newer term where appropriate, to put the performance of those earlier models in a modern context. The LaFerrari, for example, is probably Ferrari’s first hypercar, unless you think the Enzo was, but the 288 GTO is not a hypercar, and it may not have even been a supercar but merely a sports car. What the 288 GTO, Enzo, LaFerrari, F40, F50, and F80 all have in common, though, is that they were and are Ferrari’s range-toppers. This is their history.