In the mid-1980s, the Ferrari Testarossa was the most dangerous automobile on the market. Some people, though, thought it needed to be more tough. They thought that German tuner Koenig knew a lot about Ferraris, like this 1985 Testarossa. That German group rebuilt the engine, body, and interior a lot when it was brand new. This car is the best thing about the 1980s. A mid-engine, flat-12 racecar from Maranello might not stand out as much as it did in the 1980s, but Willy König doesn’t agree. It was the 1980s, and König wrote about too much. He started his business in Munich in 1977 and started making Ferraris into completely crazy cars by making crazy changes to the bodies and adding turbocharged air. He changed the spelling of his last name to make his inventions stand out from a nearby Ferrari shop. He called them Koenig Specials. Now is your chance to own what is, without a doubt, his craziest work. An auction for a 1985 Ferrari Testarossa Koenig Specials Competition Evolution II is being held on Bring A Trailer, a website run by Hearst Autos that is like Invoice Pricing. When it was fully upgraded in 1986, this car’s 4.9-liter twin-turbocharged engine made an amazing 1000 horsepower. This has more power than both an original Testarossa and a new Porsche 959 put together. Crazy! Also, Koenig Specials never shied away from mixing extremely high levels of power with crazy looks. The kit for this Testarossa was made by Vittorio Strosek, who learned his craft from Luigi Colani, who is known as one of the craziest car makers of all time. Strosek took off the Testarossa’s famous side strakes and replaced them with huge openings that sucked air into the over-boosted intercoolers of the flat-12 engine. The Koenig treatment makes the Testarossa as wide as the USS Gerald R. Ford, even though it is a big car. The back of the 17-inch multi-piece wheels have 335 mm wide tires made of steamroller rubber for now. However, they might not be able to handle all that boosted horsepower just yet. The two shiny center exhausts that stick out from the back of the car are easy to spot when it’s running at full speed. They sound like guns firing. Inside, there are four-point race harnesses and more leather than there is on Rod Stewart’s trouser rack at a concert. There is a gated shifter for the five-speed manual transmission and a rotary boost control between the seats that lets you change the amount of power (from mild fear to full dread). When put together, it’s hard to think of a stranger example of how out-of-hand Euro-tuners got in the 1980s. Go to Bring A Trailer to see how wild a Testarossa can be when Koenig Specials are added. It doesn’t get any crazier than this. On July 16, the sale ends.
