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.

The Land Rover Defender V8 answers a question that nobody strictly needed to ask: what happens when you put a supercharged 5.0-liter V8 producing 518 horsepower into a car that can also ford rivers, climb gradients that defeat other off-road vehicles, and carry a family of five across terrain that requires disconnecting the front anti-roll bar and deploying a low-range transfer case? The answer is that it works, and it works in a way that is not obviously coherent but is undeniably entertaining.