Developed in eleven months from June 1986 by chief engineer Nicola Materazzi, who had proposed the underlying idea to Enzo Ferrari two years earlier as a road-legal evolution of the 288 GTO built for a Group B category that never happened.[1] It launched with a planned run of 400 cars and a US retail price around $400,000, roughly five times the 288 GTO’s; demand ran well past that figure, and Ferrari eventually built 1,311.
Ferrari’s own claimed top speed was never matched in an independent test. Different outlets recorded different numbers on different cars (321 km/h at Nardo, 315 km/h by Road & Track, 317 km/h by Car and Driver), a spread this entry treats as ordinary test-to-test variation on a hand-built 1980s car, not a genuine conflict between sources, and records the most widely repeated of the three rather than averaging or picking the highest.
