250 GT Cabriolet Pininfarina

The alliance behind the car was sealed in 1951, when Enzo Ferrari and Battista 'Pinin' Farina — neither willing to visit the other's city — met halfway and shook hands on a partnership the industry predicted would fail. By the mid-1950s Ferrari needed profitable road cars to fund the racing, and Pinin Farina got the brief for a proper open tourer: designed and built in Turin, not passed to Scaglietti. The prototype 0655GT entered the Pinin Farina plant in the last days of 1956 and stood at Geneva in March 1957.

The forty Series I cars — the first two effectively prototypes — came out of the coachbuilder's boutique shop with covered headlamps on the early cars and no two exactly alike. The Geneva car went to works driver Peter Collins, who fitted Dunlop discs in England; the factory took notice. At the Paris show on 1 October 1959 the redrawn Series II appeared — open lamps, upright screen, more cabin and boot, discs, overdrive and the outside-plug V12 — and production moved onto Pinin Farina's new Grugliasco line, where about 200 were built into mid-1962.

The 275 GTS took over the open-Ferrari brief in 1964, and memory of the Cabriolet was eclipsed by its glamorous sibling, the California Spider. The market has since re-read the family with precision: Series II cars trade as the accessible coachbuilt V12 Ferrari at $1.1–1.75 million, while the forty Series I cars — covered lamps at the top — occupy a market of their own, four times higher.