![This Ferrari 212 Inter coupé is a coachbuilt classic car Classic & Sports Car – Ferrari 212 Inter coupé: Vignale’s Italian rarity](/sites/default/files/styles/article/public/2024-02/Classic-%26-Sports-Car-Ferrari-212-Inter-coupe%CC%81-11.png?itok=rh1Eww1J)
With no filter between brain and mouth, it’s all too easy to utter words inappropriate in polite society.
Your first sight of this 1953 Ferrari 212 Inter coupé has that effect. It’s just so, well, brazen.
That the car’s first owner had a penchant for coachbuilt flights of fantasy is no great surprise: it isn’t quite a case of style over substance, but it’s certainly one where the latter is obscured by the former.
In many ways, style here is the substance.
![The Ferrari 212 Inter coupé was styled by Vignale Classic & Sports Car – Ferrari 212 Inter coupé: Vignale’s Italian rarity](/sites/default/files/2024-02/Classic-%26-Sports-Car-Ferrari-212-Inter-coupe%CC%81-08.png)
The Ferrari 212 Inter coupé was Vignale’s take on the Prancing Horse’s finest
All of which is to be expected of a Ferrari made during the so-called ‘boutique’ era.
You have to remember that this extraordinary machine was created barely six years into the company’s narrative, at a time when road cars bearing the Cavallino Rampante logo were sold in penny numbers.
They were a means to end, a way of raising revenue to fund the marque’s racing activities.
Even then, it was rare for two cars to appear outwardly similar, most being sold as rolling chassis with buyers engaging a carrozzeria to clothe them.
Of these, Alfredo Vignale was unquestionably the busiest of them all, even if his reign was, in effect, over by the mid-1950s.