Cesare Fiorio, Lancia’s competition director, decided in 1970 that the Fulvia — which had won the World Rally Championship in 1972 — was obsolete and that Lancia needed a purpose-built rally car rather than an adapted road car. The car that resulted from this decision was designed by Bertone’s Marcello Gandini, powered by the Ferrari Dino 246’s 2.4-liter V6, and homologated for competition by producing exactly 492 road cars. It won the World Rally Championship in 1974, 1975, and 1976. Then Fiat, which owned Lancia, withdrew works support. The Stratos was replaced by the Fiat 131 Abarth. The absurdity of this decision is apparent in retrospect.

The air-cooled Porsche 911 market ran one of the more spectacular appreciation curves in modern collector car history. Cars that traded for twenty to thirty thousand dollars in the early 2010s reached six figures by 2018 and, in certain configurations, multiples of that by 2022. The 1973 Carrera RS 2.7 — the canonical desirability benchmark in the air-cooled segment — went from a strong-market price of around $400,000 to auction results exceeding $1.5 million for well-documented lightweight examples.

If the 250 GTO was Ferrari building a racing car with a license plate, the 250 GT Lusso was Ferrari building a road car with no ambiguity about its purpose. The Lusso — Gran Turismo Lusso, grand touring luxury — was a car for the owner who wanted to drive from Milan to Monaco in the morning and attend the casino in the evening, and who expected the machine doing this to be as beautiful as anything else in either city.

Carroll Shelby’s idea was simple in the way that most transformative ideas are simple: take a light British sports car body, remove its inadequate engine, and install an American V8 of sufficient dimensions to make the result deeply alarming. The AC Ace weighed approximately 2,100 pounds. The Ford 427 cubic inch side-oiler V8 produced around 485 horsepower. The arithmetic of this combination — a power-to-weight ratio that embarrassed Ferrari and Corvette simultaneously — produced a car that was genuinely dangerous to drive and genuinely faster than almost anything else on a straight road in 1965.

Thirty-six cars were built. Every one of them is accounted for. Every one of them has a documented racing history, a chain of ownership that collectors and lawyers have traced with forensic precision, and a market value that has periodically set the record for the most expensive automobile ever sold at auction. The 1963 Ferrari 250 GTO is the car around which the collector market has constructed its most elaborate mythology, and the car whose actual driving experience most owners are too cautious about resale implications to describe honestly.