I turned driving age in the mid-80s, and like most car enthusiast kids of the 80s I had a poster of a Lamborghini Countach on my wall—six feet long, which is longer than I am tall as an adult. It had such a monumental impact on me that I now consider the Countach the “gateway drug” to other wedge shaped cars. That turned me on to the Maserati Merak, Lotus Esprit, DeTomaso Pantera, Lancia Stratos, and so many more. As a teenager in the 80s, there was nothing cooler, sleeker, more aggressive, or more exotic than a wedge-shaped car.

I grew up in Arlington, Texas, a smallish town situated right in the middle of Dallas and Fort Worth. It wasn’t a town where you saw anything exotic on a regular basis. In fact, you were pretty lucky to see something like a Porsche, much less a Ferrari or Lamborghini. Nevertheless, in 1987 at the age of 17, I could easily identify almost any car on the road (despite rarely having the chance to hone my skills). It was incredibly exciting on those rare occasions I would see something unusual or exotic and shout its name with gleeful confidence. But one day, I got stumped.

It was a nice autumn day and I was jaywalking across a busy street (as teenagers do) headed towards my lunch destination with three other friends. We were seniors in high school and I was the only car enthusiast in that particular group of friends. We looked to our left to ensure traffic was stopped, then proceeded to step between the cars. When I looked to my right I saw this absolutely bonkers wedge-shaped car, the likes of which I’d never seen before. Since we were jaywalking in heavy traffic, I couldn’t just stop to fully absorb its wonder, so I tried to read the nameplate on the rear decklid. However, I found it impossible to read in passing, it just looked like some scribble. But I did notice the unmistakable cavallino rampante to the right of the license plate. That prancing horse was a dead give-away; this car must be a Ferrari.

I needed to know what this car was; I was obsessed with it. The internet wasn’t a thing in 1987, so I couldn’t just go home and Google “wedge shaped Ferrari” and discover the model that easily. What I did have was a fairly sizable collection of car magazines, such as Road & Track, Car and Driver, Motor Trend, Automobile Magazine, and a few others. I dug all of those out from the closet, bookshelves, under the bed, and anywhere else I had them stashed. I sat down on the floor in the middle of my room, magazines piled up around me and began flipping through every single page of all those magazines. Not a single one had a picture of the car I had seen, not even anything similar. Surely, if this was a Ferrari, and someone must know the model.

I tried describing this car to my other car enthusiast friends, and even other people I’d meet at car events (as scarce as those were in my home town). That didn’t help either, they all thought I had seen a Lamborghini, Lotus, or some sort of kit car with Ferrari badges. They were wrong, all of them. I knew damn well what those other cars looked like, and it was obvious that what I saw wasn’t a kit car. This was maddening, frustrating, and I quickly started to realize this might take longer than I had hoped.

For months after seeing that car, I would frequent all the bookstores (and there were a lot back then) and head straight to the magazine rack and look through all the car magazines for this car. No luck there? I’d head to the transportation section and look for books on cars, mainly Ferrari and other exotics. But still nothing. The pace eventually slowed as the months turned into years with only occasional visits to such stores. I was starting to doubt I had even seen this car, or that it was real. Maybe my friends were right and it was just some crap-built kit car with Ferrari badges. My memory of it was beginning the fade, maybe I just made the whole thing up.

Then, about five years later at the age of 22, I was in a Half Priced Books store in Dallas. I went to this store regularly, so I wasn’t necessarily on a discovery mission. I did, however, stumble across a thick picture book covering Ferrari models of a certain era. I had all but given up on ever identifying that haunting wedge-shaped car I had seen so long ago, but the book was there and I might as well look through it. I was guaranteed to see some cool cars in this book even if they weren’t the one I was so desperately trying to identify. Thumbing through the pages, I had reached a bit over half-way through the book when I gasped and stopped abruptly. Did I just see what I thought I saw? Did I just catch a glimpse of what appeared to be the car I’ve been looking for the past five years? I frantically flipped the pages back one by one until I found it. And there it was, indeed, I had found it. A beautiful photo of the car that had captured my imagination so many years ago adorned a full page in this book; it was a Dino 308 GT4.