First look: Ferrari GG50 a fitting birthday gift

HOW do you say thank you for 50 years of service to the automotive design world?In the case of Italdesign great Giorgetto Giugiaro you let him design his own Ferrari and that's how the Ferrari GG50 came into being.

The GG50 is Ferrari's way of acknowledging Giugiaro's greatness and pays homage to one of the best-known Italian thoroughbred designers.

In the GG50, Giugiaro took a 12-cylinder 612 Scaglietti four-seater coupe, retained the same mechanics and suspension but shortened the length and added a fastback rear that conspires to conceal a practical hatchback.

New too are rear seatbacks that can be folded forward to create a flat and deep luggage area.

When Giugiaro first proposed a special one-off Ferrari to celebrate his 50 years of car design the president and CEO of Ferrari, Luca di Montezemolo, was enthusiastic but made two demands of the style king.

The result must be perfectly in keeping with the Ferrari tradition and transmit a sensation of compactness, even being highly enjoyable, Montezemolo said. Giugiaro agreed.

The GG retains the Scaglietti’s 2950mm wheelbase but is 90mm shorter overall. Visually, the front end has been reinterpreted just a little, pruning the overhang by 25mm while making the rear tighter.

In the Scaglietti, the fuel tank is positioned vertically, behind the rear seats. For the GG50, Italdesign engineers repositioned the new 95-litre tank below the luggage area.

With the rear seatbacks folded down, the repositioned tank allows for a deeper and wider luggage area. Compared to the Scaglietti’s 240-litre loading capacity, the GG50 has 270 litres of space. This can be increased to 500 litres when the rear seatbacks are folded.

In a strategy intent to take full advantage of the extra luggage space made available by the new fuel tank, Giugiaro decided to use a proper hatchback for access to the rear.

Structurally, changing the fuel tank and rear architecture meant that Italdesign engineers were forced to redesign the rear cross-member which, in the Scaglietti, joins the suspension domes on top of the fuel tank.

Likewise, a strong cross-member was added to the roof to cope with the hatch’s extra weight. In the process, the re-designed rear end gives the car a sleeker shape and nipped 70mm out of the rear profile.

Although 90mm shorter than the Scaglietti, the tightness of Giugiaro’s design appears even more compact than the series-production car as a result of the subtly rounded nose and tail angles.

From a design viewpoint, the GG50 relinquishes the Scaglietti’s three box profile for a nimbler tail, an instantly recognisable fastback and an overalllook that is still unmistakably Ferrari.

The low-slung Ferrari grille looks fresh and strong, while the nose flares are well forward in the centre with two generous and vertical air intakes unfolding to the side, where the fog lights are housed. A photochromic roof was added for better cabin lighting.

The bonnet is creased almost imperceptibly by a V without disrupting the car’s natural flowing lines or bolding tapered extremities.

Likewise the tail is simple with the lower section, housing the chrome dual exhausts, painted black to reduce the overall sensation of height.