In 1986, Ferrari did something they had never done before and have never done since. They built a Testarossa without a roof.
They built exactly one, and they built it because Gianni Agnelli asked for it. Ferrari had no plans for an open-top Testarossa. The engineering involved in removing the roof from a mid-engined supercar with a flat-twelve engine and then making it structurally sound was significant. None of that was enough of a reason to say no to the man who ran Fiat.
Who was Agnelli?
Gianni Agnelli became president of Fiat in 1966. By the time this car was commissioned, twenty years later, he was the most powerful industrialist in Italy and arguably one of the most connected businessmen in the world. He was also, by any measure, one of the best dressed men alive. He wore his watch over his shirt cuff rather than under it, a habit so identified with him that it became a style reference in itself. He wore Caraceni suits over hiking boots when he felt like it. He had, in the words of people who spent time with him, a specific and complete sense of how he wanted to exist in the world, and no particular interest in justifying it to anyone.
He also had a leg injury that made clutch operation difficult, which partially explains the most technically unusual detail of this car.
The car
Ferrari started with a standard Testarossa on 27 February 1986 and handed it to Pininfarina. The roof came off. The floor was reinforced to compensate for the lost structural rigidity. An electrically operated frame was installed to support a soft-top that could be raised and lowered by pressing a button on the dashboard, which at the time was not a common feature on any car at any price. The VIN carries a “30” in the sequence indicating this was a distinct model from the standard Testarossa production run.
The transmission was replaced with a Valeo semi-automatic gearbox, one of the earliest applications of this technology on a road car, which allowed Agnelli to operate the clutch electronically rather than mechanically. This is now understood as one of the earliest steps toward the paddle-shift systems that Ferrari and the rest of the industry would later adopt across the board.
The colour was Argento 101/C, silver. This was not a coincidence. The chemical symbol for silver on the periodic table is Ag. Agnelli’s initials were GA. The inversion is deliberate. Even the paint was a private joke between Agnelli and the people who built his car. The interior carried Blu 3282 carpets and blue leather, the Prancing Horse on the nose was silver rather than gold, and the number plate read TO0000G, where TO is the Turin registration prefix, the zeros fill the number, and G stands for Gianni. The entire car is a personalised object from the VIN to the plate.
What happened to it
Agnelli kept the car until 1991, then sold it. It passed through several private owners. In 2016 it was sold at Artcurial in Paris for EUR 1,210,080. Since then it has belonged to British Ferrari collector Ronald Stern, who had Piero Ferrari personally certify the car’s authenticity and deliver it to his home in London. In May 2026, the car appeared at the Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este, where it was photographed in motion for the first time in years.
Why it matters
The Testarossa Spyder is one of those cars where the story and the object reinforce each other to a degree that is unusual even in the world of one-off Ferraris. The car is genuinely beautiful. The flat-twelve engine produces 390hp and the sound it makes with the roof removed is different from anything the coupe delivers. The semi-automatic transmission was technologically significant. The colour choice is a piece of personal mythology.
What other coachbuilders did afterward, the Straman conversions, the various aftermarket Testarossa spyders that began to appear once Agnelli’s car became known, are not this car. Ferrari declined every inquiry for a production version, citing the difficulty of making the roof structure viable at scale. There is one Testarossa Spyder. It was in the personal collection of Gianni Agnelli. The silver paint is the symbol for his name.