Race reports.
Atelier notes.
Heritage.

Two finishes inside the top three, one weekend, one chassis. The rear aerodynamic package we flagged in Issue XII has earned its first result, and it has done so on the circuit where downforce pays the steepest price.

The programme ran across the final weekend of March. Qualifying on Saturday placed the 296 chassis fifth on the grid, which the drivers found unexpected. The rear wing had been revised overnight to a higher-incidence setting, a change that in Friday's test had produced understeer through the second Lesmo. By qualifying it had been remapped.

Sunday's race one ran clean. A second-place finish came off a slipstream pass on lap twenty-seven into the first chicane. Sunday's race two was wetter, with a safety-car period at lap eight. The chassis gained three places on the restart and held them to the flag.

The engineers note — and they will elaborate in Issue XV — that the aerodynamic map under development for the 2027 season was not in use. Both podiums were achieved on the homologated 2026 package. That is the detail we find most interesting.

Inside the studio where a handful of chassis become personal. A commissioning visit begins with a brief — typed, on linen, to the atelier — and ends, two years later, with a car the customer and three engineers have discussed more times than most couples discuss a house.

The process admits only sixteen commissions per calendar year. The waiting list, currently at forty-one, is closed until MMXXVIII. What we can describe here is the shape of a commission that arrived in Modena last autumn and will leave in summer MMXXVII.

A closed-roof berlinetta, silver lead paint, a carbon lower splitter in the pattern of the 1961 Sebring car. The interior trim is in a leather that has required three dye baths to match a jacket the customer has worn since 1994. The instrument cluster is unlit except for the tachometer.

Nothing about the mechanical package has been altered. The atelier's position on that has been consistent since principle VII.

Why the 250 GTO remains the marque's most-studied chassis. Thirty-six were built between 1962 and 1964, and every one of them survives. That statement is worth pausing on: sixty-four years of road use, track use, crashes, fires, thefts, and restorations, and every chassis plate is accounted for.

The archive holds the build records of twenty-nine. Seven more have been identified through insurance registries, auction catalogues, and, in one case, a letter from a previous owner's widow. The Club does not publish chassis numbers, and will not, out of respect for the custodial agreement with current owners.

What the archive does publish is the engineering notebook of the original programme. Three copies exist, bound in oxblood calf, held in Modena, Maranello, and — on permanent loan — the Brooklands Museum. Members are welcome at any of the three sites by appointment.

The GTO is significant not because thirty-six chassis were built, but because every detail of every chassis was decided by three men over eighteen months. A committee larger than three cannot design a GTO. We have, over the years, tested this proposition. We continue to believe it.