21/05/2025
308 GT4
The misunderstood Ferrari?
SD: Not every Ferrari has achieved instant greatness, but I've long felt the 308 GT4, originally badged as a Dino, has been unfairly slighted for years.
Let's start with the way it looks. For some reason it gets labelled 'ugly', typically in a kneejerk reaction by the sort of people who only accept a car as 'beautiful' if there isn't a single straight line on it anywhere. With its slim bumpers, elegant detailing (the headlamp units are barely bigger than the lamps they contain, yet fit so neatly) and taut proportions, it's a classic piece of wedge design.
But it's from Bertone, rather than Pininfarina. So many odd reasons have been given for this over the years, often people claim Ferrari 'fancied a change', but the reality is more complex.
This was the first Ferrari road car to be designed and developed in its entirety under Fiat's control, with Enzo Ferrari exiled to solely running the Scuderia. Enzo, it was believed, owned shares in Pininfarina, and in order to demonstrate its independence from Enzo's control, Ferrari's road-car division was instructed to use a different design house.
Ferrari initially approached Ghia - traditionally, before the Pininfarina partnership, Ghia had bodied several of them. But it was now owned by a rival, Alejandro de Tomaso, who was about to sell it to Ford. Politically, it wouldn't work, especially given that a few years earlier, Ford had tried to buy Ferrari, been snubbed in Fiat's favour, then struck back on track with the GT40 and Cosworth DFV, and on the road with De Tomaso.
So belatedly, Ferrari turned to Bertone, and its design maestro Marcello Gandini. At the time, Gandini was working on a remarkably similar design brief for Lamborghini - another mid-engined transverse-V8 two-plus-two - and was weighing up two predominant design themes, one patterned after the new Countach, the other evolved from the Miura via the Marzal concept car.
That car was, of course, the Urraco. And so far as the Lamborghini contract was concerned, the Miura/Marzal theme won out. But this meant there was an unused design sat on Gandini's drawing board, and Ferrari was in need of a remarkably similar car.
When you know this, the 308 GT4 design makes so much more sense. In its angular bonnet ridges, trapezoidal taillights, wedged profile, air vents tucked down the trailing edges of the rear three-quarter windows, and near-flat, wide windscreen with no tumble-home at the bases of the A-pillars, you can see a baby Countach. Perhaps it would have been better-received with a charging bull on its nose. But regardless, it doesn't make it any less sensational to look at.
Ferrari would return to Pininfarina and Leonardo Fioravanti for the two-seater version, the 308 GTB, resulting in a baby Berlinetta Boxer. However, in my humble opinion, they both look just as sensational - but the GT4 is better to drive.
With eight more inches to its wheelbase, and slightly higher-geared steering at 3.3 rather than 3.5 turns lock-to-lock, not to mention more room in the cabin including more adjustability to the driver's seat, the GT4 is more planted on the road, more incisive on the turn-in, more comfortable, easier to control and far easier to see out of than the GTB.
It's a pity, then, that Ferrari hadn't made enough of them when Luigi Chinetti built a Le Mans racing version, as it ended up in the Group 5 prototype class, rather than the Group 4 production-based class as intended, where it would have traded blows with the Porsche 911. The ACO's refusal to reclassify it even once enough cars had been built to homologate it the following year prompted Chinetti to withdraw Ferrari from Le Mans altogether in 1975. Had it been allowed to race in Group 4 it might have beaten the Porsche, cementing its reputation in the minds of onlookers too.
Because that's another thing - it's nicer to drive, and just as accommodating, as a Seventies 911. Several magazines reckoned it was actually the better car.
