Kerry put up a great article/interview with John Surtees from Supercar Classics about the 330GT among others. I have excerpted it below, if you want to see the whole piece go here (in the "What's New" section):
http://209.128.90.174/KBC/ferrari/330GT.htm
JOHN SURTEES
SUPERCARS I HAVE KNOWN
John Surtees, car and bike world cham-
pion, is choosy about his road cars. While
driving for Maranello, he was offered a
Ferrari coupe, but initially turned it down
Surtees has had
long-lasting affection for BMW 507 . Car, a reward for winning
his first world motorbike championship, has relaxing
character, is undemanding to drive fast
.....when I drove it out to Italy to see Ferrari, they said: ‘You can’t have a German car here. You’ve got to have a Ferrari.’
Quite frankly, I didn’t want one, because I was too fond of the BMW. The factory had rebuilt it in 1959 when we were doing the disc brake programme and it had done only 36,000miIes since then: it was like a new car. As I didn’t want to put a lot more miles on it and it didn’t seem worth falling out with Ferrari over a road car, I agreed to take one. Initially, I wanted a Lusso, but realised that it had about the same size boot as the BMW: and I’d had problems with the luggage space on that. So I had a 330GT instead, because I’d just got married and needed more room. In fact, I had two 330s. One was a super car, the other was a bit duff.
Neither was what you would call a super sporting machine, but they had a nice straightforward single-cam 12-cylinder engine that could rev reasonably well up to about 6000. By this time I had got much more involved in cars and started tinkering with them. I changed the shock absorber settings and the anti-roll bar to make it a little stiffer. I was also fairly particular about the tyres, because at any one time there is a tyre which really suits any given car, although that’s changed to a certain extent today because the tyre business has become so competitive. I think we had the Ferrari on Pirellis at that time because Michelin was only just getting into that scene.
I used the first 330GT for about a year and a half, then got a new one for 1965. That was never quite so good: it wasn’t as quick, and didn’t handle so well, no matter how much you checked the settings. You get cars like that, especially when they are hand built. So my mind went back to a Lusso, but Mr Ferrari told me that it was being phased out. He said: ‘You’ve got to try one of the new ones: like a GTB. The problem with the Lusso is it’s too beautiful. A Ferrari should be aggressive, a Ferrari should be angry.’
I tried the GTB and found it was the biggest heap I had ever driven. It was a dreadful motor car. I had crossed swords with Mike Parkes, who was Ferrari’s development engineer at that time and I certainly couldn’t agree with what he’d done with the GTB. I thought it was awful and, for a while, Ferrari agreed. He hesitated about putting it into production, but it represented a big investment, because all the panels were stamped out instead of being knocked out by hand: it really was a big step for Ferrari. At any rate he had a good think about it, so it went through a lot of changes during the early years.
Ferrari also had to change the car’s mechanical configuration because you needed a whole autostrada to keep an early one straight at more than 80mph. It had aerodynamic problems and a sort of floating axle location which meant that the rear suspension steered, It needed a big programme totally to rehash it; I sort of tried one a few times, but stuck to a 330GT until I left Ferrari in the middle of 1966.
I have fond memories of the 330GTs because I love 12-cylinder engines — as a car it did nothing especially well, but then I think road cars often have to have the best compromise. You will rarely find a car that does anything extra special, but if it is relatively sympathetic in the way it behaves under differing road conditions — especially when you’re travelling fast in difficult ones — you’ve got a good car. It needs to give you messages and you need to be able to create a relationship with it. You might be thinking about business when you are driving, whereas in the perfect world you would be concentrating hard. It’s then that you need such a car.
It’s different on the race track for the simple reason that all you have to do is get on with the job in hand. You’ve tuned the car as well as you can, while everybody else has worked to make it go around a given circuit as quickly as possible. You can never do that with a road car, which is why I have always needed this sort of Jekyll and Hyde machine.
It has to be a car in which I can potter along, listening to the radio, and looking at super countryside, yet has to be capable of getting from A to B quickly if I need to. It has to have a responsive engine and roadholding, without feeling as if it has no suspension. That’s why I like my 507 so much.
It wasn’t intended to be a race car. It is forgiving, it’s comfortable and it’s quick. The best I’ve seen is 148mph. It becomes a little more difficult to drive as you go faster, but it communicates well, so that it is safe to drive fast.
I certainly had less trouble with my 330GTs than I did when trying to run Jaguars.
SUPERCAR CLASSICS September 1988
[/url]