The Ferrari 288 GTO is a batshit car from a batshit time

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This is the 1984 Ferrari 288 GTO. It has turbo lag in spades and ergonomics suited to a short-statured chimpanzee. It sounds odd, like a household appliance with a cold. It’s stupidly expensive. And, as Road & Track executive editor Sam Smith discovered, it’s goddamn fantastic. I’ll let Sam describe it:

From 1984 to 1985, you could buy one of these things and rest assured in the knowledge that you were driving something batshit in a time when Ferrari did not do batshit. It did art, occasionally slow, not always pretty, not always dramatic. The 288 was not slow, nor was it ugly. It was basically an ingot of pure drama dipped in a coat of absurdity and turbo lag.

What was it like to drive? Read Sam’s unvarnished opinion of the orphaned Group B homologation special.