THE LINE YOU DON’T CROSS

There are certain cars that resist interference. Not because they are fragile, or beyond improvement in any measurable sense, but because they seem to have reached a rare state of completeness. Their lines are so deeply embedded in our collective memory that any change feels less like design and more like trespass. The Ferrari Testarossa belongs to that select category. It is not merely a machine from Maranello. It is an object of visual certainty, a shape that came to define an era and then quietly outlived it. Its width, its strakes and its theatrical flat-twelve presence all feel resolved. Untouchable, almost. Which is precisely why the idea of removing its roof sounds, at first, like the kind of suggestion best left unanswered. Yet in the hands of Niels van Roij Design, it became something far more interesting than provocation. When I first looked at this project for Retromotive, what stayed with me was not the spectacle, but the restraint.

This is not a Testarossa crudely transformed for shock value. It is something more unsettling and more impressive: a car that asks a dangerous question with such composure that you begin, against your better judgement, to accept the answer. To understand why, it helps to understand the man behind it.

Niels van Roij runs an award-winning automotive design studio in the Netherlands, specialising in coachbuilt and highly bespoke vehicles. After more than a decade in automotive design in London, including work connected to OEM research and design projects, he turned his attention fully to handmade commissions developed in close collaboration with clients. His studio is known for a small number of highly individual projects, each developed with a strong emphasis on proportion and visual discipline. That background matters here, because the Testarossa leaves very little room for careless interpretation. “Every project begins with a request,” van Roij says.

In this case, the request appeared simple enough on paper. The client wanted an open-top, flat-twelve Ferrari. As often happens in coachbuilding, however, the brief was only the beginning. The idea itself had precedent. In 1986, Ferrari created a unique Testarossa Spider for Gianni Agnelli to commemorate his twentieth year at the head of Fiat. It remains the only open Testarossa officially commissioned and built by the factory. Finished in silver, a reference to the chemical symbol Ag and the first two letters of Agnelli’s surname, the car received blue detailing, a folding white roof and a specially developed Valeo clutch system that allowed the clutch pedal to retract. Ferrari records cited in its 2016 Artcurial auction catalogue date the beginning of body construction to February 1986, with delivery following four months later. Others pursued the same idea outside Maranello. Richard Straman produced Testarossa Spider conversions in California, while Pininfarina completed further private commissions, including cars associated with the Sultan of Brunei. Lorenz & Rankl and several other specialists also converted Testarossas during the late 1980s and 1990s. The precise numbers remain uncertain. Auction catalogues and specialist records variously attribute around twelve or approximately thirty conversions to Straman alone, illustrating how incomplete the history of privately commissioned coachbuilding can be. This history changed the question surrounding the car that would become Guida Touring Sport. Simply removing the roof was no longer an achievement in itself. Van Roij had to develop an approach that belonged within the original shape without repeating the full Spider treatment. The studio considered several possibilities. “A convertible soft top, hard top convertible and targa were all explored,” van Roij explains. “It was never meant as provocation. It became a necessity.” The Targa eventually emerged as the strongest answer. It opened the cabin while allowing the car to retain its original identity.

That idea is reflected in the finished car. The surfaces remain clean, the detailing is deliberate, and the visual language stays disciplined. Where new components were required, they were developed with the same approach. One of the clearest examples is the roof mechanism, where the studio designed and machined aluminium levers in-house. The execution is more precise than a period production part might have been, but the forms still sit comfortably within the world of the original Testarossa. “Period correct base, improved finish and precision,” is how van Roij describes the balance. The same measured approach appears in the way van Roij speaks about authorship. Coachbuilding inevitably raises the question of who really creates the finished object. Is it the client who commissions it, the designer who shapes it, or the team that builds it? “It is shared,” he says. He describes the process as co-design, with the client defining the intent and the studio translating that intent into a coherent form. That helps explain why the Testarossa Targa feels personal without becoming arbitrary.