Back in 1980, Pininfarina’s 50th birthday present to itself was this remarkable conceptfor a four-door Ferrari, powered by a flat-12 engine.Few styling houses have such a long and distinguished history as Pininfarina, and none has a closer association with Ferrari. So when Pininfarina bosses decided to produce a concept car to mark their company’s 50th birthday in 1980, it had to be something extraordinary, and it had to be a Ferrari. The Ferrari Pinin – named after founder Battista ‘Pinin’ Farina – was that car.
It was Sergio Pininfarina, Battista’s son and by then head of the company, who dreamed of creating a Ferrari-badged rival to the new wave of high-performance high-prestige saloons, which included the Aston Martin Lagonda, Mercedes 450 SEL 6.9 and, most of all, the Maserati Quattroporte, whose third generation had been designed by arch rival Giorgetto Giugiaro’s Italdesign.
There was a real buzz in the run up to the 1980 Turin motor show. On the streets of the Piedmont capital you could hear the rumours that the city’s design house had prepared something special, but no-one really knew what to expect. You’d certainly have got long odds on a four-door Ferrari, for there had been nothing like it in the marque’s history and Enzo’s opposition to anything with more than two doors was well known. So imagine the intake of breath when the curtains dropped and a Ferrari limousine became a fact. Positioning it with some of Pininfarina’s most famous models of the past – classic Alfas and Cisitalias – only served to make it appear even more shocking and otherworldly.
