Ferrari's 1984 288 GTO ignited the sporadic violence of the Porsche-Ferrari übercar war.
About a decade and a half after Porsche eschewed its lightness-and-small-displacement strategy and built a five-liter sports racer to take down Ferrari at Le Mans, a different sort of war kicked off between the two marques: a battle for supremacy in the super-supercar market.
In 1984, Ferrari built a radically modified twin-turbo 308 GTB with an eye toward Group B road-racing rules. Porsche countered the resultant 288 GTO with the mighty 959, which launched at about the same time as the 288's successor, the practically skeletal and infinitely loopier F40.
When Ferrari launched the Enzo Ferrari a decade ago, Porsche countered with a cost-no-object hypercar of its own, the Carrera GT.
Now that Porsche is set to produce the V8/hybrid 918 Spyder, featuring 718 gas-electric horsepower, Ferrari's Enzo successor couldn't be shown up by a mere Porsche. It just wouldn't do. So the new car, rumored to appear this fall, will feature 920 hp, 800 of those horses developed from a 7.3-liter evolution of the 599 replacement's V12, reports Automobile. The additional 120 ponies arrive electrically, via a kinetic-energy-recovery system.
Given that Ferrari is shooting for reduced weight, don't be surprised if the new car--unshockingly rumored to be called the F70--will weigh somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,500 pounds, about three-quarters of a ton less than the slightly more powerful Bugatti Veyron 16.4. Buff the mind's eyeball with the potential acceleration numbers. Now buff some more. Yep.