The story
The Super Twelve proved that 240 hp in a 3-meter hatchback was the easy part; getting it to the road was not. So for Geneva in March 1984, with Bernd Grohe paying, Franco Sbarro started from a whole Ferrari 308 GTB. He shortened the frame and kept the rest: the double wishbones, coil-overs and anti-roll bars at both ends, the ventilated discs, the transverse 2,927 cc V8 with 4 valves per cylinder and Bosch injection, and the 5-speed dogleg transaxle. Over it went a new fiberglass body in the Twelve's language, with the louvered nose panel, the chin spoiler and the slatted flanks, plus staggered gold-centered BBS wheels and, because the parts bin was handy, taillights from an Opel Ascona.
On paper almost nothing changed: the same 240 hp, the same 800 kg (1,764 lb) and only 14 lb-ft more torque. On the road everything did, because 1 engine feeding 1 differential behaves the same way every time. It was built to be used, with power windows and a Clarion cassette stereo, and its owners have covered something like 19,000 to 20,000 miles in it. Nobody ever published performance figures. It went from Grohe to the Sbarro Museum and on through private owners and dealers, and its Dutch registration identifies it by its Ferrari engine number rather than a chassis number of its own.
