It’s not exactly beautiful, especially considering what the Maranello brand has us become familiar with up to the present day; still speaking of the brand, the badge on the nose of this car – because, believe it or not, this is a car – doesn’t look right like the original, as it is not. Yet, this is not an example of those questionable modifications so criticised by the Prancing Horse either, given that it has even had the honour of being exhibited at the Ferrari Museum.
But let’s discover more about it. The car we’re talking about, which has gone down in history as the Testa d’Oro, is a one-off clearly devoted to performance and speed, with its aerodynamic extremism being one of the hallmarks of the work of its designer, Luigi Colani.
Luigi Colani, born Lutz (1928 – 2019), was a German designer with an obsession for aerodynamics. The Testa d’Oro project is not the only instance in which Colani’s pencil has modified cars far beyond recognition to make them into record-breaking machines. His projects also include the Abarth – Alfa Romeo 1300 Berlinetta Colani, which lapped the Nürburgring in under 10 minutes, and a Citroën 2CV restyled in such a way that it travelled 100 km on just 1.7 litres of fuel. For the Testa d’Oro, designed in 1989, the aim was to break the speed record for road cars; for this purpose, well hidden under the futuristic bodywork is none other than a Ferrari Testarossa – hence its name.
But since aerodynamics is not everything, Colani turned to German tuner Lotec who, thanks mainly to the use of two turbos, almost doubled the power output of the 4,943 cc, V12 180° engine from 390 to almost 750 hp. It is not clear how happy the Maranello company was with the whole operation; when in doubt, the Ferrari logo was removed from the intake manifolds – gold in colour – as was the prancing horse from the nose.
The goal, however, was achieved: in 1991 the car, branded Lotec Colani Testa d’Oro, appeared at Bonneville Salt Flats, US, and set the speed record for road cars at 350.7 km/h, shattering the previous record set in 1987 by another Ferrari, the F40, at 325 km/h. It is not the fastest road car ever, as Colani actually wanted, but it goes down in history nonetheless.
The current one is the latest version of the Colani-designed bodywork, progressively upgraded in the attempt of making the Testa d’Oro the fastest road car ever. The aerodynamics is so extreme compared to the one presented at Bonneville visible in the period films that the car is unrecognisable, but mainly almost undriveable, albeit recently overhauled, especially due to the huge front spoiler.
In 2015, after the car had been put on display in the Ferrari Museum, the Testa d’Oro became the protagonist of a detective story: the one-off – which is allegedly worth €1.7 million – disappeared from a Maranello dealership where it had somehow ended up and even been put up for sale. The details of the whole affair still remain hazy, but the car has nevertheless reappeared and was on display on the stand of the Registro Italiano FIAT at the 2022 edition of AutoMotoRetrò in Turin, Italy.
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