Life on the limit

Far from a fragile prima donna, this competition-veteran 308GTB is proof that the glassfibre-bodied Ferrari has a heart of steel

- SIMON HUCKNALL

Beneath the roundels and sponsor stickers of Robert Pulleyn’s 308GTB racer, there actually exists a road-registered Ferrari.

It looks completely at home parked here at the top of Harewood’s atmospheric hillclimb track, which plummets down deep into the North Yorkshire valley below us. But, if you keep in mind this Ferrari's road-ready status, three facts about it defy any casual assumptions you might make. First, this near-50-year-old Ferrari's odometer is within a European tour of hitting 100,000 miles, yet it retains most of its original mechanicals; second, despite being street-legal, it is reputed to be the most-raced Ferrari in the world, with 37 years of continuous competition history on circuits and hillclimb courses in the UK and Europe; and last, it is one of just 157 right-hand-drive 308GTBs that left the Carrozzeria Scaglietti works wearing glassfibre bodywork.

Far from being conceived for competition, though, these examples clothed in glassfibre (or vetroresina in Italian) were merely the genesis of 308GTB production. When it was launched at the Paris Salon in 1975, this was the first – and, as it turned out, the only – Ferrari production car ever to wear this type of composite bodywork, with only its front lid panel made from aluminium. Quick to productionise, another immediate and highly marketable benefit of the material was lightness. Ferrari claimed a 1090kg dry weight that, while still in excess of 200kg heavier than the then recently launched Lotus Esprit, was impressive given that a V8 was mounted within the tubular steel frame.