Ferrari 512 M Testarossa

The 512 M, properly the F512 M, is the last of the Testarossa family. Ferrari built the Testarossa from 1984, revised it as the 512 TR in 1991 and closed the line with this car in 1994. The flat-12 is not a true boxer but a 180-degree V12 of 4.9 litres, mounted behind the seats, and in F512 M form it is quoted at 440 hp thanks to titanium connecting rods, a lighter crankshaft and reworked intake and exhaust.

The visual changes are easy to read once you know them. The pop-up headlights of the earlier cars gave way to fixed units behind clear covers, and four round tail lights returned in place of the grille panel across the tail. The side strakes everyone remembers were never decoration: they feed the radiators Ferrari moved from the nose to the flanks, which is also why the car is so wide at the rear. Production ran to a little over five hundred cars in two years, which makes the F512 M the rarest of the Testarossas and the one that ended a twenty-year run of flat-12 Ferrari road cars that had started with the Berlinetta Boxer.

Why the Flat-12 Testarossa Is the One to Keep

Values have followed that engine. Nothing Ferrari has built since uses the layout, and the character it produces, wide, low, torquey and slightly unhurried, belongs to no other era. In period the Testarossa was measured against the Ferrari F40 and the Lamborghini Countach 5000 QV, and the gap in character is still the interesting part: the F40 is a stripped twin-turbo racer for the road, the Countach a wedge with a V12 and no manners, the Testarossa a genuine grand tourer that happens to carry twelve cylinders.

The name has since come back on a very different car, which we set against Lamborghini's V12 in Revuelto vs 849 Testarossa. In the Batman Garage collection this is the oldest Ferrari, photographed alongside the modern GTC4 Lusso, and auction context for classic Ferrari twelves is in our report on the Enzo Rosso Dino record.