MIDDLE CLASS

Ferrari's first V8 went on sale five decades ago. John Barker drives the 308 GTB, F355 GTS and 360 Modena, each defined by an evolution of that engine - and each with it mounted amidships. Which would you choose?

- John Barker

Out of sight, the sound comes to us on the breeze, a tight, urgent bark rising and rising, passing the reach of a normal engine and seeming to escalate, to keen ever harder until the sound is a dizzying wail. A pause… and then the cry resumes, lower in pitch but climbing just as urgently again, building to the same, thrilling crescendo. To we enthusiasts standing in a car park on a Berkshire hilltop, it’s music, a symphony created by eight cylinders in vee and a flat-plane crank.

Perhaps Enzo Ferrari didn’t envisage the heights that the V8 would reach. As with the V6 that preceded it, he deemed the V8 unworthy of the Ferrari badge initially. The first car to use it, the square-edged 308 GT4, was a Dino. Designed by Bertone’s Marcello Gandini, it was – and still is – an underrated car, a neat, cleverly packaged and stylish 2+2, the brilliance of which became properly clear only when its replacement, the gawky Mondial, came along.

Ferrari’s mid-engined V8 line came two years after the GT4 went on sale when, in 1975, the 308 GTB was launched. Penned by Pininfarina’s masterful Leonardo Fioravanti, the GTB was a sublime piece of design, more than worthy of the Ferrari badges it wore from the get-go, and it started a line of V8-engined ‘junior’ Ferrari supercars that would span five decades.

The first iteration of the Franco Rocchi-designed V8 powering it was a 3.0-litre 16-valve four-cam producing 252bhp; the last, fitted to the 360 Challenge Stradale, was a 3.6-litre 40-valve giving 420bhp. During its 30-year life there would be many variants, from a 2.0-litre Italian taxbreak special making 155bhp, to the F40’s 3.0-litre twinturbo putting out 478bhp. There was also its curious deployment in the nose of the Lancia Thema 8.32, with a conventional rather than flat-plane crank.