Grand Tourers on Automobilist.org

Ferrari Portofino: The Folding Hardtop That Made the Entry Ferrari a Real Grand Tourer

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Black paint, cream leather, silver five-spoke wheels, yellow calipers. Parked nose-out in a public lot with the roof up, which is how most of these actually live. The Portofino is the car people point at and call “the small Ferrari,” and that description has been wrong since roughly 2018.

The lineage here starts with the 2008 California, which arrived carrying more firsts than any Ferrari of its decade: first front-mid-engined V8, first seven-speed dual-clutch gearbox, first multi-link rear suspension, and the first retractable hardtop the factory ever built. Purists hated it on sight. The roof mechanism added mass. The proportions were awkward from certain angles. The rear end looked like it had been designed by a different department, because in a sense it had been. And it sold in numbers Maranello had not seen before, largely to people who had never owned a Ferrari at all.

2026 Ferrari Roma Spider: The Convertible That Does Not Make Excuses

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Ferrari Roma Spider solved a problem that convertible GT cars have struggled with for decades: how to remove the roof without materially degrading either the driving experience or the visual coherence of the closed car. Ferrari’s retractable hardtop — which deploys or retracts in 13.5 seconds at speeds up to 60 km/h — preserves the Roma Coupe’s rear proportions sufficiently that the Spider does not look like a convertible that wishes it were a coupe. It looks like a car designed to be driven open, which is what it is.

The Aston Martin DB5 Was James Bond's Car Before It Was a Collector Car

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The cultural weight that a single film appearance in 1964 deposited on the Aston Martin DB5 has complicated its assessment as an automobile. The DB5 is a beautiful, capable, mechanically sophisticated grand tourer that would command serious collector attention based on its own merits. It is also the car that Sean Connery drove in Goldfinger, and that association has inflated its market value, attracted buyers who are purchasing cinematic mythology rather than automotive excellence, and made it difficult to discuss the car as an object rather than as an icon.

The 1962 Ferrari 250 GT Lusso Is What the GTO Looks Like When It Dresses for Dinner

Mon, 15 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.