Ferrari 512

This is the catalogue record of the Ferrari 512, one of 352 models Ferrari has placed in the historical record and one of more than seventeen thousand cars the MotorJury library tracks. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.

The era it was born into

The record does not fix a firm introduction year for the Ferrari 512, which is itself informative: cars without a clean launch date are usually prototypes, coachbuilt specials, or models whose history was written down long after the fact. The catalogue keeps them anyway, because the odd corners of the record are where the interesting machines hide.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Ferrari 512 reads like this: the record lists its engine as gasoline engine; quoted output is 404 kW (550 hp) @ 8500 rpm (512 S), 449 kW (610 hp) @ 9000 rpm (512 M); kerb weight is recorded at 815-840 kg. Worked together, those figures give roughly 496 horsepower per tonne — the single number that says more about how a car actually moves than any of its parts alone. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.

Its place in the Ferrari story

Within Ferrari's own catalogue the Ferrari 512 sits alongside the 250 GTE, the 328 GTS, the 348 TS, the 360 Modena. The record names the Successor = as its predecessor and the Team = Scuderia Ferrari / Team Penske (512 M) as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to Mauro Forghieri / Giacomo Caliri / Gioacchino Colombo.

On the record

The Ferrari 512 also has a competition record: Podiums = recorded wins from Wins = starts and Drivers_champ = championships. A race history changes how a car should be valued — competition machines appreciate on provenance, not depreciation curves.

How this catalogue works

This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.

Why concepts and prototypes are in the library

Most car databases stop at series production. This one deliberately does not, because concept cars, racing specials and cancelled prototypes are where the industry thinks out loud — the ideas tested in public years before they reach a showroom. Holding them beside the production cars they inspired makes the lineage legible: nearly every landmark road car in this library has a concept ancestor somewhere in the catalogue, and the connections run through the era links on every page.

From catalogue to ownership

The catalogue records what the Ferrari 512 was; the ownership database records what it is like to own. MotorJury computes a verdict for every model year the United States federal record covers — complaints, recalls, real economy — refreshed nightly, with no opinions involved. If this car reached the American market, its verdicts are in there.