My memories of grade school are fairly blurred…thank a career in the Army that included explosions, chemicals and “heroic” levels of drinking, plus other issues that come with time. It also doesn’t help that I attended four schools before the end of my fourth-grade year, either. I couldn’t tell you the name of the first kid I fought, or any of that mess. But I can tell you about the strange little prize fair days that all of the schools seemed to do in some way, shape or form. Maybe it was a bake sale thing, maybe it was a fundraiser, or part of the Book It! program, but at some point the kid would acquire points that could be turned towards getting prizes. Inevitably, posters were part of the prize pool, and me being me, it came down to a choice of two: did I want the Lamborghini Countach or the Ferrari Testarossa?

Truth be told, I wanted neither. As a kid, I didn’t learn about the one fact of the Countach that has endeared itself to me…nobody in Illinois, Colorado or Washington I knew was going to tell a young child that the name translated to something akin to “Holy shit!” The Testarossa…no. The side strakes and the fact that it was the car to have at the time just killed it for me. Wasn’t there a poster of a Camaro, or a Mustang, or maybe a 1957 Chevy in the listing? No? Well…okay, just give me the colored pens and leave me alone, I’ll draw my car instead. Supercars didn’t do it for me. You never saw them in person. I could see the occasional Corvette, but a Testarossa? Never.

That changed after I moved to Washington. My grandfather had gotten me a gift, a kind of card catalog deal of the cars of the world. It was a nice healthy mix…the Birdcage Maserati, the Hemi Belvedere, the BMW 507, the Toyota 2000GT…prior to getting Gran Turismo for a Christmas gift, that card catalog was my resource material for my knowledge bank. And I remember seeing this car in one of the early packs that came in the mail. The 288 GTO. The cards all had a description that went along with the details, and the writer who got tasked for writing the blurb for the GTO knocked this one out of the park. This was a racing car that Ferrari wound up having to put on the street, because the race series was too dangerous to exist. I didn’t know anything about rally at the time, but Ferrari took their race car and made it street legal? And it didn’t look like the Testarossa at all…there were no strakes, no louvers, no pastel suit and cocaine excess to the car. The GTO looked haunched, spring-loaded, ready to rock. The tires were wide, the pipes looked loud. Pardon my sacrilege, but the 288 GTO, in my head, is the closest that Ferrari ever got to building a musclecar. Built for competition, barely toned for the street, aggressive looks enhancing an otherwise “pedestrian” platform. The 288 GTO was the 308 on a major anger bend. I adored it. I loved the thought behind it. I still do. I might have to sell every last organ in my body to afford one, if I’m lucky. But would it be worth it?

I’ll answer that question properly when I have had the chance to snick through the gears.