The 50th anniversary of Ferrari’s landmark 250 GTO will be celebrated with a special GTO class at the 17th annual Amelia Island Concours d’Elegance next March 9–11. The GTO is a tribute to the days when auto manufacturers paid special attention to racing’s various rulebooks and built cars specifically to suit them and satisfy the FIA’s homologation process.
Upon perusing 1962’s new rulebook for Grand Touring Car racing, Enzo Ferrari set his engineering staff to work mating their existing 300 hp V12 with an exquisite aluminum-bodied coupe from Scaglietti, but all did not go smoothly. Several key members of the team left the program following disagreements with Mr. Ferrari, which led to a young Mauro Forghieri stepping up to pull everything back together. The result was one of the most beautiful and successful Ferrari racing cars ever.
A month after its February 24, 1962 unveiling in Modena, the GTO made its competition debut at the 12 Hours of Sebring, where Phil Hill and Olivier Gendebien drove one to 2nd overall while winning the GT category. A GTO would win its class at every World Manufacturers Championship race throughout the remainder of the season—twice bagging overall honors—as well as taking 2nd overall at Le Mans. Similar success marked the following two seasons, with GTOs winning their class eight of ten times in ’63 (with four overall wins), and nine times in 11 races during ’64, while registering three more overall wins.
This illustrious competition pedigree aside, the GTO remains one of the most sensuously beautiful cars ever designed, and so it is this combination of strength with beauty that will be honored at Amelia Island in 2012. For complete information about the Amelia Island Concours d’Elegance, please visit www.ameliaconcours.org/.
