The Last of Maranello's Flat-Twelves

Ferrari built its first mid-engine, twelve-cylinder road car in 1973 — the 365 GT4 BB — and spent the next eleven years refining the same basic idea before turbocharging and, eventually, the Testarossa changed the conversation entirely. The 512 BBi, built from 1981 to 1984, was the last word on that idea: a flat-twelve engine laid low behind the driver, breathing now through Bosch K-Jetronic fuel injection instead of carburetors, mostly to satisfy emissions rules that carburetors could no longer meet.

The flat-twelve layout — Ferrari called it a boxer, though it's technically a 180-degree V — was chosen for the same reason Porsche has used the format for decades: it drops the engine's center of mass low in the chassis. In a mid-engine car, that matters more than almost anything else. It's part of why the BB series drives the way it does — planted, analog, unhelped by any electronic intervention — and why enthusiasts who've driven both will tell you it feels like a different species from the V8-powered Ferraris that came just after it.

This particular car has covered a genuinely low 18,000 miles and wears its age honestly — unrestored, original, and documented rather than cosmetically refreshed to look newer than it is. That's the harder thing to find in this era of Ferrari: not a BBi that's been made to look perfect, but one that never needed to be.

It is, in the most literal sense, a badass car — the last of a breed Ferrari never built again.