Ferrari 849 Testarossa

The 849 Testarossa is a mid-engined, all-wheel-drive plug-in hybrid: a 4.0 litre twin-turbocharged V8 and electric motors making 772 kW, or 1,050 PS, or 1,036 hp, depending on which country you are reading in. It was revealed on 9 September 2025.

The name is the provocation. The original Testarossa was a naturally aspirated flat-twelve, rear-wheel drive, with side strakes you could see from another postcode, and it is the car on the bedroom wall of every man now old enough to afford one. Reviving that name for a turbocharged, electrified, all-wheel-drive V8 is Ferrari telling its customers, with total confidence, that the thing they are nostalgic about was never the engine layout.

Testa rossa means red head, and it referred to the red-painted cam covers on a 1950s racing engine. It has never technically meant twelve cylinders. This is the kind of argument a marketing department wins on a technicality and loses in a bar.

A thousand horsepower is now a mid-range figure among cars costing this much, which is a sentence that would have read as satire fifteen years ago and is simply the state of the market.