Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

So just imagine howling along the Grande Corniche above Nice, the open cockpit gently marinated in warm aromatic breezes of mimosa and pine, the emerald sea glinting below, the sound of the engine bouncing back off the cliffs as you overtake the sparse but slow everyday traffic, while propelled by a Le Mans winning V12, cornering on road-race suspension and, on arrival, almost out-dazzling the sun with the car’s achingly gorgeous Pininfarina bodywork. Spiders, or Spyders to use the earlier spelling, and Cabriolets and Barchettas, are among the most impossibly desirable cars Ferrari has made over its long history of making impossibly desirable cars. And that re-created journey demonstrate the two reasons why. First, because many of Ferrari’s competition cars have been open-cockpit, and the experience of driving an open car hard on the road is even more intense than when a metal roof is overhead; the feeling of speed, the sound of the engine, and the tangible link with Maranello’s racing cars. And, secondly, because an open car, in the times when it’s not being driven fast, has the potential to be simply a more glamorous conveyance than a closed car. It puts the occupants more intimately in touch with the surroundings they’ve chosen to travel through and it also puts the occupants on show, almost demanding of them that they dress up to match the glamour of the car. Gradually, as competition cars became more specialised and less capable of being used on the road, Ferrari’s open cars have more-or-less split into two different lineages. On the one hand, are the competition-related extreme-performance road cars and, on the other, those that emphasise beauty, luxury, and glamour – bearing in mind that “luxurious” for Ferrari still amounts to “pretty darned purposeful” by any other standards. It’s worth reminding ourselves of these two lineages because right now, in the new 458 and the California, there’s a representative of each kind in the Ferrari line-up. The competition-type open cars are, of course, where it all began, with Enzo Ferrari making his own cars from 1947. To Enzo the engine was really all that mattered, but others in the Company, including ironically the engine designer Gioachino Colombo, wanted a distinctive body design for Ferraris.