Originally published on RobbReport.com

Most terms in the automotive world have fixed definitions: a spark plug, a station wagon, etc.

A few, however, are a bit more slippery. At the tail end of the last millennium, the fastest, most powerful road cars went by a magnificent superlative: supercar. Here in the 21st Century, though, that name apparently seems banal; the term has found itself spread far and wide to describe any road car of a certain type of design and level of performance, no matter where in the lineup it lies, Nowadays, we call most machines at the top of the charts a hypercar.

But at the end of the day, the supercars of the 20th Century and the hypercars of today are the same thing: the tip of the spear for a car company, their greatest achievement of the era. The difference in names is an arbitrary decision, but by the standards of their respective decades, they mean the same thing.

For the purposes of this story, we’ll use the newer term where appropriate, to put the performance of those earlier models in a modern context. The LaFerrari, for example, is probably Ferrari’s first hypercar, unless you think the Enzo was, but the 288 GTO is not a hypercar, and it may not have even been a supercar but merely a sports car. What the 288 GTO, Enzo, LaFerrari, F40, F50, and F80 all have in common, though, is that they were and are Ferrari’s range-toppers. This is their history.

1984: The 288 GTO kicks off the supercar era

In the 1970s, turbocharging had gone from niche technology to a mainstream idea in the automotive world; Formula 1 had revealed how dominant turbo engines could be in racing, while Porsche’s 930 (a.k.a. the first 911 Turbo) had showcased how effective they could be on the street. For nearly four decades, Enzo Ferrari and his company had worshipped at the temple of natural aspiration, but the turbo’s potential could no longer be ignored. The carmaker’s first boosted model, the 208 Turbo, was effectively a compliance car, a workaround for the Italian market meant to dodge taxes on cars with engines above two liters. Its second turbocharged model would be something far more wild.

That car, the 288 GTO, would share its basic bones with the 308 GTB of the day, but the changes were substantial. The wheelbase was stretched out, enabling the engine to rotate 90º from the 308’s transverse layout to a longitudinal one. That engine: a 2.9-liter twin-turbocharged V8 connected to the rear wheels through a five-speed manual, cranking out 395 horsepower at 7,000 rpm and 366 lb-ft of torque at 3,800. (This in a car that weighed just 2,555 pounds thanks to fiberglass, carbon fiber, and Kevlar body panels.) Air vents and spoilers paid homage to the 250 GTO of years before, while the wide body fender flares and quad daytime running lights mounted below the flip-up headlights.

With all that power and so little weight, excellent performance was assured. Ferrari claimed a 0-26 mph time under five seconds and a top speed of 189 miles per hour, and testing by Road & Track proved that wasn’t far off the mark, revealing a 0-60 time of 5.0 seconds flat and a quarter-mile run of 14.1 seconds at 113 mph — the latter figure suggesting the car was more traction-limited than missing any ponies. That said, even though the American magazine tested the car, U.S. buyers would never be able to buy a 288 GTO direct from Ferrari; all imports were handled through the gray market. That would change with the sequel.

1987: The F40 takes the supercar to the next level 

Impressive as it was, the 288 GTO was ultimately an enhanced version of an existing car from Maranello’s stable. Its successor, however, would be something else entirely: an entirely bespoke machine, unlike anything else the Prancing Horse had to offer. The F40 would commemorate 40 years of Ferrari, wrapping up all the successes of the company into a single high-octane package. (It would also prove to be the final car ever personally approved by Enzo himself, who passed away in 1988.

The power plant was an evolution of the 288 GTO’s twin-turbo V8, its displacement slightly expanded (although rounding still brought its formal size to 2.9 liters) and its power rising to 471 hp at 7,000 rpm and 426 lb-ft at 4,000. As with its forbear, a five-speed stick controlled all that, with the power reaching the road through the rear wheels. The design, however, was unlike any Ferrari to come before. Impossibly low and ground-hugging, with an integral rear wing and a bubble canopy of a cabin, it looked more like a Le Mans racer than anything else — and it only came in red.

And it was practically as raw as a race car, with a stripped-down interior that lacked carpeting, a stereo, or even leather; the closest thing to luxury in the bare-bones red-and-black cabin was an air conditioning pumped through a few small vents. Those sacrifices not only made the car more engaging to drive, they helped shave weight and improve performance – and there was plenty of that. When Car and Driver laid their hands on one, they saw it zip from 0-60 in 4.2 seconds, run the quarter in 12.1 at 122 mph, and top out at 197 miles per hour.

Buyers loved it. While Ferrari originally planned on making 400 copies of the F40, the money kept flowing in, so the company kept building: all told, more than 1,300 examples rolled out of the factory, even at an official price tag of just under $400,000. And American buyers could finally, officially, get in on the fun, with nearly one-sixth of those reaching U.S. owners through dealership channels.

1995: The F50 refines the breed

While the F40 had been made to celebrate an anniversary, its successor was created, basically, because it had been a while since the F40 launched. Nevertheless, the F50 still made a splash — in no small part because the engine mounted between the cabin and the rear axle was a return to proper Ferrari form.

While the design may have been an evolution of the F40’s — the exposed headlights and deep air channels may have been new, but there was no mistaking what inspired that mighty integrated rear spoiler — the mid-engined car’s motor was an entirely different beast. The turbos were banished and the cylinder count grew by 50 percent, as Ferrari’s range-topper gained a V-12 for the first time. The 4.7-liter naturally-aspirated 12-cylinder motor was based on the brand’s 3.5-liter Formula 1 engine of the early 1990s; while adapting it for the streets involved winding back its power and expanding its displacement, the F50’s 12-pot still managed to develop 512 horsepower at 8,500 rpm and 347 lb-ft of torque at 6,500. As before, that force went to the rear wheels, but this time, a six-speed manual gearbox handled the power distribution.

In terms of absolute performance, it was all but neck-and-neck with the F40 of the previous decade (a fact that led Ferrari to be somewhat skeptical about car magazines and other independent testers taking it for a spin), but by any objective measure, there was little to complain about. When Car and Driver did finally lay their hands on an F50 for testing, they found it ran 0-60 mph in 3.8 seconds and a quarter-mile in 12.1 at 123 mph, with a top speed of 194 mph.

Due to an issue with F40 flippers hiking up prices to double the MSRP for more and taking the profits for themselves, the carmaker forced all of the 55 American F50 buyers to lease it for two years before deciding whether or not to fork over the remainder of the money, enabling Maranello to keep a tight grip on the cars even after they were out of the factory. Still, the company had little trouble finding takers for the 349 copies to be made. The rarity and naturally aspirated V-12 worked in the F50’s favor in the end; these days, the F50 tends to sell for a significantly more common F40. Speed isn’t always everything, in the end.

2003: The Enzo helps create a trinity

The first Ferrari supercar of the new millennium still boasted a 12-cylinder engine amidships, but it was a whole new ballgame in nearly every other way. The Ferrari Enzo, as it was called (Maranello tried to convince everyone that it was actually called “Enzo Ferrari,” not “Ferrari Enzo,” but, well, that’s not how car names work) was built as a showcase of technologies the company used in racing — and pointed the way towards the future of the carmaker’s road cars.

A naturally aspirated V-12 was, once again, the power source, this time displacing 6.0 liters and making 651 hp at 7,800 rpm and 485 lb-ft at 5,500. But instead of a classic gated shift lever between driver and passenger, the Enzo used a sequential manual gearbox with a computer-controlled clutch and paddles behind the steering wheel. The system had become popular in the company’s other cars ever since it was introduced in the F355 in 1997; while it wasn’t particularly smooth in real-world driving, it did snap off shifts under passionate driving with an alacrity few humans could match.

The rest of the car was even more revolutionary, in many ways. The Enzo boasted active aerodynamics, using adjustable spoilers and diffusers on top of and below the body to manipulate the airflow to dial downforce up or down depending on speed and circumstance. The brakes were carbon-ceramic disks, a cutting-edge little-used technology at the time. The body was made from carbon fiber — and unlike any Ferrari ever before, a futuristic array of hard angles and sharp vents, with a nose that brought to mind nothing so much as a Formula 1 car with some added sheet metal attached.

The added years and technological advancements gave the car a performance leg up over its F50 predecessor. When Motor Trend managed to strap their test gear to an Enzo under ideal conditions (at Ferrari’s home track, with a Ferrari driver behind the wheel), they saw it rip from 0-60 mph in 3.1 seconds. (The claimed top speed of 217 mph wasn’t reachable on the track in question, but it doesn’t seem infeasible, considering the Enzo weighed around as much as the 197-mph F50 but packs far more power and better aerodynamics.)

The Enzo’s arrival and its limited production of 498 copies would have brought plenty of attention to the brand regardless, but it benefited from arriving at roughly the same time as two other bleeding-edge supercars. Soon after the Ferrari, Mercedes-Benz and its then-partner McLaren revealed the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren, a super-GT supercar that packed an AMG heart inside a Gordon Murray-engineered body; hot on the heels of that car came Porsche’s Carrera GT, a roadster packing a V10 based on a defunct F1 / Le Mans engine idea. The three cars were very different in how they went about their business, but they each represented the state of the art for one of the world’s greatest sports car makers, so they quickly became associated together — forming a trinity of supercars that still define one another to this day.

2013: The LaFerrari fills out a second trinity

Ferrari’s cars had used many a naming convention over the brand’s long history, but the name of the carmaker’s twenty-teens-era hypercar was a statement of intent: the LaFerrari was “The Ferrari,” full stop — the ultimate expression of the brand’s road cars, (In yet another instance of being contrarian, Ferrari insisted the car didn’t use a brand name or a definitive article; rather than “the Ferrari LaFerrari,” Maranello insisted it should simply be “LaFerrari,” like Cher or Madonna. Not surprisingly, it didn’t catch on.)

The name may have been odd, but there was nothing awkward about the performance — except, perhaps, the faces it caused drivers to make when they floored the gas. The LaFerrari marked the brand’s first hybrid for road use, leveraging lessons learned in Formula 1 to add electric power to a naturally aspirated V12. The latter displaced 6.3 liters and spat out 789 hp at 9,000 rpm and 516 lb-ft at 6,750 all by itself, which would have been enough to make the Enzo look bad – but Ferrari paired that with an electric motor to help add power and fill in the low end of the torque curve. The total output: 950 horsepower and 664 lb-ft of torque, all sent to the back wheels through a seven-speed dual-clutch paddle-shift transmission that delivered snappy shifts but was smoother than the old sequential manual.

The LaFerrari’s design went in a different direction from the Enzo, as well, trading in the F1-inspired geometric angles for flowing lines and organic curves that gave it more of the look of an oceanic predator. For the first time, Ferrari’s hypercar-class machine became available in both coupe and roadster forms, with the LaFerrari Aperta offering open-top motoring via a removable carbon-fiber lid or a canvas cover. (All F50s had been targas, technically speaking, but the LaFerrari marked the first time buyers could choose between true coupe or convertible … or, in many cases, just buy both.)

All that power and all the technology to harness it proved, unsurprisingly, capable of delivering some spectacular performance. Car and Driver’s tests at Ferrari’s own Fiorano course clocked a 0-60 time of 2.5 seconds and a quarter-mile of 9.8 at 150 mph. The top speed of 218 mph went untested, but if the speedometer on one example taped on the autobahn is to believed, the LaFerrari can actually punch its way all the way to 231 mph.

And as with the Enzo before it, the LaFerrari arrived at the right time to compete against two other bleeding-edge hypercar foes. That same year, McLaren unveiled the P1, which also was introduced at the Geneva Motor Show in March of 2013 and made 903 hp from its own combination of a 3.8-liter twin-turbo V-8 and an electric motor. Porsche, meanwhile, turned the 918 Spyder concept car of 2010 into a production car that fall, using a naturally aspirated 4.6-liter V-8 and an electric motor to make 875 combined horsepower. All three bent the boundaries of what a production car could do – and all three pointed to their brands’ future speed machines, as Ferrari, Porsche and McLaren alike would go on to democratize their hybrid performance powertrains across more affordable vehicles over the decade to follow.

2025: The F80 pushes the limits once more

By the fall of 2024, it had been more than a decade since Maranello had rolled out a new range-topper — the longest gap ever between range-toppers since the first one set the standard. Ferrari’s regular sports cars had already begun to blur the line between super sports car and hypercar — the SF90 Stradale pushed the 1,000-hp mark and could run 0-60 in two seconds flat — but a true halo vehicle that epitomized the carmaker’s total capability had been a long time missing.

Enter the Ferrari F80. For the first time in over 30 years, a V-12 wouldn’t sit at the heart of Ferrari’s range-topping hypercar — but neither would a V-8. Instead, the F80 would use a 3.0-liter twin-turbo V-6 derived from that in the 296 GTB / GTS, spinning up 888 hp all by itself. But it won’t be by itself, instead playing with three electric motors – one for each front wheel, another that feeds the rear axle along with the gas engine, with an eight-speed dual clutch gearbox shifting cogs. Combined, the powertrain spits out 1,184 horsepower.

The F80 hasn’t entered production yet, but Ferrari is already claiming a 0-60 mph time of under 2.2 seconds and a top speed of 217 mph. Whether this powertrain or performance level is enough to wow buyers accustomed to cars of similar acceleration is an open question, but also, perhaps, an academic one; Ferrari says all 799 examples have already been spoken for, even at an asking price of just shy of $4 million a pop. Still … we’re excited to see how it performs in the real world.