Ferrari 365 GT4 BB: Bardot’s inspiration at Maranello
Ferrari built the Ferrari 365 GT4 BB with such beauty that staff in Maranello nicknamed it after one of the era’s most celebrated film stars. With a bit of sleight of hand, the company then folded that moniker into the car’s official name. Now that Brigitte Bardot has died, the story reads as a brief, respectful nod to her enduring icon status.
Many enthusiasts know Ferrari for names that sound poetic. For years, Ferrari chose those names based on engine unit displacement. You could even calculate the displacement of a Ferrari by multiplying the car's name by the number of cylinders (for example, 275 times 12 equals 3,300, and so on). One particular Ferrari broke the pattern and carried a film star’s initials on its bodywork. The factory used BB in honour of Brigitte Bardot.
The tale sounds incredible, and it could easily become the plot of a movie. Ferrari set out on an ambitious quest to find an heir to the beautiful Daytona. Ferrari gave Pininfarina a daunting brief: 'build a car with a 12-cylinder engine mounted centrally rather than at the front, but with the same appeal of the Daytona.'
Ferrari aimed to crush the competition, and the engineers chose the powertrain with intent. They moved away from the classic V12 and selected the 'flat' 12-cylinder model instead. The layout used the 180-degree 'V' that had brought endless joy in Niki Lauda's Formula One car.
Designers faced a brutal trade-off. The new mid-engine Ferrari could no longer wear the superb, endless bonnet of the 275 GTB or the Daytona. It could not rely on a tapered rear end, and it had to give up the rear windscreen that evoked the classic GT Coupé. Pininfarina had to imbue a mid-engine Ferrari supercar with elegance despite its tiny, wedge-shaped nose.
Pininfarina met the challenge and built a prototype that looked like a masterpiece. The team joined two shells, one above and one below, (which is why the first BB was two-toned, as emphasised by its black side). The front sat extremely low and compressed, wrapping the windscreen around the cabin. The bonnet also turned the air intakes and cooling grids into pure design features for the first time.
Leonardo Fioravanti shaped the concept and gave it its charisma. The prototype looked truly beautiful, and it carried such charm that Fioravanti and his colleagues at Maranello, Angelo Bellei and Sergio Scaglietti, fell head over heels for that Ferrari. Their affection ran so deep that they nicknamed it Brigitte Bardot, or BB, as the French actress was known.
Emotion ran deep, the car looked outrageous, and Ferrari engineers faced an immense task as they developed the marque’s first mid-engine road car. As they worked hard on fine-tuning the prototype, all Ferrari units working on the car's development got into the habit of referring to it as BB, Brigitte Bardot.
The 1971 Turin Motor Show then unveiled the 365 GT4 BB. The name deserves a proper explanation. Maranello used '365' for the unit displacement, which, multiplied by twelve, gave a total displacement of 4.4 litres. The badge used 'GT' to mean 'Gran Turismo'. It used '4' to refer to the number of overhead camshafts (two per bank). The 'BB' created the real intrigue. No one had heard of a Ferrari with a woman's name, so Ferrari claimed, officially, that it represented 'Berlinetta Boxer', and the neat solution covered up the love story.
That explanation strained credibility and concealed two clear clues that BB actually meant Brigitte Bardot. First, Ferrari typically used the term 'Berlinetta' for a front-engined car with bodywork that recalled a saloon ('berlina' in Italian), not a futuristic mid-engined supercar. Second, Ferrari also stretched the term 'Boxer'. Engineers did not build an actual boxer engine. They built a V12 and spread it to 180 degrees. A true boxer uses a crankshaft that looks different and appears to push the pistons together (hence its name). Besides, no boxer engine could withstand the incredibly high rotation speed typical of a Ferrari 12-cylinder engine, which, and not by accident, derived from the 312B's engine that was thrilling the world of Formula 1.
Even so, the new Ferrari drove the world crazy, just as Brigitte did. Jorge Veiga used to sing “BB, BB, B,B por que é que todo mundo olha tanto pra você?” ("BB, BB, B,B why does the whole world look at you so?"). One glance at the Ferrari 365 GT4 BB, and at the actress, says it all.