If you’ve been reading car magazines during the last few decades, you’ve likely come across the name Jason Cammisa. After starting with Automobile in 2006, he moved on to Motor Trend, Road & Track, and, since 2020, has produced video reviews for Hagerty.
During his 19-year professional career, Cammisa has driven an astonishing number of cars: nearly 3,000 at last count, all of which he tracks in a spreadsheet. He also owns a small collection of vehicles, headlined by a pair of 1980s’ Volkswagens, a 1990s’ BMW 850 CSi, and the car shown here: a 1975 Dino 308 GT4.
You’ve driven 2,900-some cars during your career. How many of those were Ferraris?
Let me look at the spreadsheet. Let’s see, there’s 30, 40, and…50. Fifty different models. A few from the 1960s, more from the ’70s and ’80s, and most from the ’90s and beyond.
Over the course of those 50 Ferraris, did you develop a special affinity for the marque?
I was never a fan of Ferraris prior to having driven one. I’m not a supercar-type person. I don’t gravitate towards cars that have a lot of flash. In fact, I go the other way; I like cars that are wolves in sheep’s clothing.
No car fits my personality more than a Volkswagen GTI. It’s a class-less car that can be parked in front of a fancy hotel or in front of a $20-million mansion, and you won’t know whether it’s owned by the staff or a guest. Ferraris are the opposite. They tend to tell people, I care more about my external appearance than the average person.
And, to be honest, I wasn’t a particular fan early on when I started to drive them. When you drive your first couple of Ferraris, you’re just overwhelmed with this sense of theater, of occasion, and the mystique. Wow, I’m driving a Ferrari! That’s something people aspire to do.
But reality sets in after a little bit, and then you can start to be a little bit more objective about what they do well and what they don’t do well. And I respected the cars, but once the initial wow factor wore off, they just became another car for me to evaluate. With the modern stuff, I very much appreciate what they do, because they tend to be pretty damn good.
On the other hand, most of the Ferraris I’ve driven from the 1980s and ’90s have not lived up to my admittedly lofty expectations of what they should drive like. Most of the mid-engine V8 cars didn’t come close to my expectations, and there’s an era of V12 cars that also just don’t offer, say, the theater from the driver’s seat commensurate with their looks.
What do you mean by “commensurate with their looks”?
I have this ridiculous formula in my head that I call the “douche factor”—and yes, I know it’s insensitively named. The way it works is, you give a car a rating of one to ten on how it looks, then give it the same rating on how it drives. If it looks like a ten and drives like a ten, that’s a douche factor of zero. But a car that looks like a ten and drives like a three is, well, a big douche.
I personally gravitate towards cars that outperform their looks, that surprise me. And I feel a lot of the 1980s’ and ’90s’ V8s have looks that promise more than their driving experience can back up. I’m not talking just raw speed, I’m talking about the overall experience: steering feel, handling, ride quality, build quality, engine response, engine noise, power delivery, shift feel, clutch engagement, all of these little things that add up to make a great driving experience. I just think most of the Ferraris of that era fail to reach the spectacular-ness of their looks.
You know that’s not the party line around here, right?
I definitely don’t want to insult anyone who’s got any Ferrari. There’s no such thing as a good car or a bad car; it’s just a matter of what’s important to you. Coming from the world of class-less peasant cars, like Volkswagens and E30 BMWs, I have really high standards for what an engine is going to do, and what steering is going to feel like, and what’s going to make me want to dump whatever other car I’m dating at the time.
In the pursuit of owning a Ferrari, I drove a 308, a 328, an F355, and a 360—and hated them all. I exaggerate, hate’s too strong a word, but I was so excited at the opportunity to spend every penny I had saved up for 20 years, and came away broken-hearted because those cars weren’t as fun as my stupid old Volkswagens.
The only Ferraris that have exceeded my expectations of their appearance were the Dino 246, the 308 GT4, the 288 GTO, and the F50. The F50 is just one of my favorite cars to drive, and it’s also amazing to look at, but my favorite, the one that tops out both appearance and driving experience, is the GT4.
I think it’s beautiful. I think it’s a very mature design that you have to spend time really looking at to understand and appreciate. Its looks are not supercar. Right on the surface, it doesn’t look like a Ferrari, and its looks certainly don’t promise much performance. But the way it drives blows my mind.
What do you like so much about the car’s appearance?*
I have to hand it to my friend and podcast co-host Derek Tam-Scott, who said to me, when he owned this very car, that his favorite part about it was the curves. I thought he was drunk, because the GT4 is such an exercise in straight lines at first glance. But when you look closely, it has subtle curves everywhere.
Look under the front and rear valences—which are completely invisible on the U.S. cars because of the way the bumpers wrap around—and they look just like those on the Lamborghini Miura. Which makes sense, because they were designed by the same guy, Marcello Gandini, a decade apart. On the side intakes, the way the metal goes from straight lines into a round intake on the upper flanks is just some of the coolest detailing I’ve ever seen. And then the whole body actually has a subtle curve to it from front to rear. The subtlety of those curves is what got me.
And what about the driving experience?
The GT4 was the first Ferrari I had driven that actually fit my mental image of how a vintage Ferrari would drive. It was this well-constructed car that drives nicely, with a wonderful ride, good visibility, a usable driving position, and controls that are evenly weighted, fall right to hand, and are naturally progressive in their action.
But it’s the motor that dominates the entire experience. When you combine the induction noise of four twin-throat Webers, plus this bizarre, sort of four-cylinder vibration from the flat-plane V8, the whole experience just becomes magical. There’s a matrix of different sounds. You have induction noise, which is changing constantly with load. Revs change the pitch, and the exhaust changes, as well, but then you have the sounds from the three drop gears that transfer the engine’s power from the crankshaft down to the transmission input shaft, and the sound of the synchros in the transmission. It’s a constantly changing tapestry of different noises, a feast for the ears.
And then, on top of all that, it’s fast as hell, way faster than I thought it would be. It puts it all to the ground well, it handles well, and it’s just a cohesive vehicle.
Is there a non-Ferrari that does a similar thing, perfectly balancing looks and driving experience?
You’re going to laugh, but I’d say my two Mk. 1 Volkswagens [a.k.a. first-generation 1980s’ Rabbit/Golf, Cabriolet, and Scirocco]. They are some of the closest cars I’ve driven that offer the same experience.
Take my Scirocco 16V. It’s quiet inside, it’s usable, it’s a nice cruiser, but when I get on it the engine becomes so dominant. There’s no sound insulation, the firewall is paper-thin, so you hear everything the engine’s doing, in addition to the intake and exhaust noise. It feels like the engine’s in the car with you, and the car dances in ways even the 308 GT4 can’t in terms of handling. There’s a reason why the Mk. I GTI is the original giant slayer. It does things it has no business doing, and by virtue of the lack of insulation between you and the controls and the engine, it offers some of the most fun you can have.
Both my Cabriolet and Scirocco have built 2-liter 16-valve engines that rev to 7,200 rpm and make 170 horsepower, so they’re way quicker and more violent than they originally were. But they are probably my two funnest cars, and are certainly two of the most fun cars I’ve driven. They’re stupid, but they’re fun.
And they, like the 308 GT4, have a manual transmission, which I know is big deal for you.
The way I see it, you need to interact with the engine more than the car—right? A car is basically nothing more than a body that contains the engine; the engine is the centerpiece. And when you have a manual transmission, you have direct control over that engine’s speed and output.
Automatics remove that control from you, and modern cars no longer even have an accelerator pedal or gas pedal or throttle pedal. They have a “torque request potentiometer” which removes the direct connection between your right foot and the engine itself. I think that’s removing an integral part of bonding with an engine, because you’ll never truly know what its response is like, you’ll never know how quickly it actually revs.
There are so many characteristics that are now just data points and inputs that are interpreted by a computer or a torque converter or some other device between you and the engine. That’s especially the case on modern cars once you add turbocharging and computer controls and hybridization; you never know whether the engine’s at 10-percent throttle or 80-percent throttle. It’s just never going to be the real thing.
One of the “risks” of regularly driving the latest and greatest cars is that the experience puts a spotlight on any shortcomings of cars you own.
I’ve always worried that I would experience something so great that I would come back to my cars and hate them—and that has happened before. I had a Porsche 996, and after driving a 997 I came home and sold my car. The 997 fixed everything I hated about the 996, in ways that I couldn’t even have imagined, and then my car was dead to me. But after almost 3,000 cars, I don’t get home, look at the cars I have now, and think, I can’t look at this car the same way again.
Including the 308 GT4?
Every time I drive the GT4, I think, This is such an experience, this is so different from everything, and it’s so enjoyable. As I said a minute ago, the only Ferraris I’ve driven that would make me think twice about owning my GT4, if I had only one spot for a Ferrari, would be the 288 GTO, the F50, and the Dino 246. I wouldn’t buy an F50 because it’s just not my style of car, but I could own a 246 in place of my GT4. But there aren’t too many cars that would make me reconsider the GT4, and certainly none that are financially in the same ballpark.
How did you find this unusual white example?
Derek Tam-Scott showed up with it at my house, and I walked outside and asked, “What is that ugly white thing and why did you buy it?” He handed me the keys, and we made it 1.2 miles before I asked if I could buy it from him. It took him three years, but when he called me in June 2018 to offer it to me, I said “yes” before he’d finished the sentence. It was the first GT4 I’d driven, but during those three years I drove another one, maybe two, and decided to wait for this white one.
What was so appealing about this particular car?
It was just ratty enough. It looks great in pictures and it presents well, but it’s not a cream puff. I’ve learned my lesson by making some of my cars a little bit too nice, and then I worry too much about getting a scratch or a ding or something. This car was just the right combination of used-car paint and patina with mechanical perfection. Somebody had gone through and replaced every bushing in the suspension, gotten everything mechanically sorted, and the car just felt whole.
Plus, I couldn’t do a U.S.-look car with those terrible bumpers. This is a U.S. car, but back in the ’80s someone fitted the Euro bumpers. It wasn’t a small job; they had to fill in holes in the sheet metal and repaint things, and I just wish they’d done away with the U.S. marker lights, too! At the same time, they painted the sills and under the nose in grey, which should be black. The wheels are from the 308 GTB, which is correct in that you were supposed to replace the Dino wheels after ten years, but they’re not the originals.
The U.S. cars aren’t as fast as European cars, either.
I drove a late U.S. car and was mortified at how slow it was. But mine’s a 1975 model, and it has no emissions controls—two air pumps but no catalytic converter—and there’s a big difference in power and response between it and later cars. They were 252 hp in Europe, and the first year in the U.S. they were rated at 240 hp, which was effectively the same thing minus 10 horsepower to run the two air pumps. But when they put the converters on the car and revised a whole bunch of things, they brought the rating down to 205 hp.
If I remember correctly, in the magazines they were about eight seconds to 60 mph, while my car was 6.4. The original’s top speed was 155 or 152 mph—you can’t trust Ferrari’s numbers, but you can believe the period reviews—while the late U.S. cars did 134. That’s a major difference in power, and there’s also a full second and a half difference between them through the quarter mile. Plus, the U.S. cars at the end were 3,400 pounds. I’ve weighed my car and it’s 3,025 with a full tank of gas.
What do you use your Ferrari for?
I just kind of drive it. I mean, I’ve done some weekends of back-road driving with it, it’s been my Monterey Car Week car, but what I like best is that it just turns normal drives—and this is such a cliché, stupid thing to say—it kind of turns normal trips into something special.
I wouldn’t waste miles in this car on something like a road trip between San Francisco and Los Angeles. It’s running at 4,000 rpm minimum on the highway, 70 mph is approaching four grand, so you’re doing between 4,000 and 5,000 rpm with the engine screaming. It rides like a dream, it’s just not a long-distance GT as much as, you know, a nibble-at-gaps-in-traffic sports car.
What would you say to someone to convince them to consider a 308 GT4?
Go drive a 308 GTB, or an F355, or any of the mid-engine V8 Ferraris, then come back and I’ll hand you the keys to this one. After you drive it, if you don’t want to buy it, you’re gonna have a lot of explaining to do.
