Ferrari 288 GTO designation?

Anyone care to enlighten me as to the significance of the "288" designation for Ferrari's 288 GTO.

I'm figuring one of the 8's is for eight cylinders but can't figure out the rest.

Thanks in advance.

It's a turbocharged 2.8 litre V8, isn't it?

Originally posted by 2F-001
It's a turbocharged 2.8 litre V8, isn't it?

I didn't think the displacement was so small but the numbers do make sense.

Just like the F40, that at first was designated 288 LM as it was ment to run at Le Mans, which it did 7 years later.

Originally posted by biercemountain


I didn't think the displacement was so small but the numbers do make sense.

It was indeed a 2.8 liter engine, turbocharged. If my memory is correct it was 2850 cc.
At that ime the turbo multiplying factor was 1.4 and 2.8 * 1.4 made almost 4.0 , making the car technically fall within the categopry up to 4 liters.

Did you know by the way that for tax reasons Ferrari had built a turbocharged, 2 liter version of its production V8 engine in order to create cars for the local marked, based on the 308? They were named the 208 but sold only in Italy. They were made because there was a hefty tax on cars with engines over 2 liter and the 208 wasn't taxed for that.

Don't know if many were sold of them and how they compared against the regular 308's.


Henri

There was the:
208 GT4 1975 & 1979 840 units
208 GTB 1982 160 units
208 GTS 1982 140 units
208 GTB Turbo 1982 437 units
208 GTS Turbo 1982 250 units
There was a 328 variant that were simply called GTB Turbo and GTS Turbo. Not a 2.2 but 2.0 intercooler...

The GT4 was (just like the 308 GT4 and also the 206/246 Dino) seen by the customer as the 911 from Maranello due to relative low prices. Hence many were used quite roughly and many poor samples are available.

Specs are all over the net.