This is a Ferrari Tipo F101 V12 engine that benefits from a rebuild in 2015. It’s capable of 340 bhp and 315 lb ft of torque, with a displacement of 4.8 liters, it has an aluminum block and heads, and double overhead camshafts per bank.
The Tipo F101 C V12 was originally fitted to the Ferrari 400 GT, a stylish, angular grand tourer built from 1976 to 1979 with styling by Pininfarina legend Leonardo Fioravanti.
The Tipo F101 C V12 was originally fitted to the Ferrari 400 GT, a stylish, angular grand tourer built from 1976 to 1979 with styling by Pininfarina legend Leonardo Fioravanti.
History Speedrun: The Ferrari Colombo V12 Engine
The Colombo V12 was a masterpiece of engineering by anyone’s standards, but particularly by the standards of the time it was first designed. The engine debuted in 1947, just two years after World War II, with a design so sophisticated it quite literally left most of the competition in the dust.
Gioacchino Colombo had started out working under the great Italian engineer Vittorio Jano at Alfa Romeo. In the mid-1930s he had designed the elegant Alfa Romeo 158 engine for the Alfetta, it would be this design that caught the eye of former racing driver Enzo Ferrari, who had lofty plans to establish his own automotive marque.
The V12 that Colombo would design for Ferrari had a 60º V-angle, an aluminum block and heads, a single overhead cam per bank, crossflow heads, and a displacement of 1.5 liters. It was a revelation by the standards of the time, many sports cars still relied on far more rudimentary engines with iron blocks, iron heads, pushrod actuated valves, and non-crossflow heads.
The Colombo V12 would be used in many of the first Ferraris, it was even used in Ferrari’s Formula 1 cars in supercharged form for a time before it was usurped by the much larger Aurelio Lampredi designed V12.
Colombo’s V12 would remain in use in most of Ferraris sports racing cars, and production cars, including icons like the Testa Rossa, 250 GT SWB, 250 GTO, and countless others. The engine would grow in displacement from 1.5 liters all the way up to 4.9 liters, it would switch to fuel injection replacing the carburetors, and it would get an additional overhead cam per bank.
Production continued until 1988, 41 years after it had first been introduced, and today it is unquestionably one of the most important engine designs of the 20th century.
The Ferrari Tipo F101 C V12 Engine Shown Here
The engine you see here was sourced from a Ferrari 400 GT, the Italian automaker’s primary grand tourer of the late 1970s, and into the 1980s with the closely related 400i and 412 successors.
The engine you see here was sourced from a Ferrari 400 GT, the Italian automaker’s primary grand tourer of the late 1970s, and into the 1980s with the closely related 400i and 412 successors.
This V12 was rebuilt in 2015 and it comes with six side-draft Weber carburetors, though these are currently not installed. It’s important to note that the engine is said to have a leaking head gasket, and this will need to be attended to before the engine is run or installed into a car.
This Colombo V12 is now being offered for sale out of Wylie, Texas at no reserve on Bring a Trailer here. If you’d like to read more or place a bid you can visit the listing here.
Images courtesy of Bring a Trailer
Articles that Ben Branch has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
