Ferrari 849 Testarossa

The 849 Testarossa is mid-engined and all-wheel drive: a 4.0 litre twin-turbocharged V8 with electric motors, making 772 kW, or 1,050 PS, or 1,036 hp, depending 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 visible 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 those men, with total composure, that the thing they were nostalgic about was never the engine layout.

Testa rossa means red head, and it referred to red-painted cam covers on a 1950s racing engine. It has never technically meant twelve cylinders. That 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 would have read as satire fifteen years ago and is simply the state of the market.