That's so weird

... it generally helps to indicate what car you're talking about... year, coupé/cab etc.

1st and reverse used to be same, just with an additional gear between to - reverse - the first gear.
So it makes perfect sense to have them in the same plane.
Additionally, 1st is only used to get the car off a stand still but essentially never when driving.
Many cars used to have non-syncro 1st and reverse gears in Europe till not so long ago.
Added advantage of the dog leg is quicker shifts from 2nd to 3rd within the same plane, which in hilly European countries is great for hairpins and the following straight sections.

And Ferraris are not the only ones with dogleg first - even humbler vehicles like the 2CV have them.

On convertibles it's common to have to boot locked when the car is off so things don't get stolen out of your trunk just by the press of a button while your car is parked open. That's why gloveboxes used to have key locks on them. On the t, you only need to be on ACC, not all the way to ignition on.

Hope this helps

 

The dog leg is a racing thing, 2/3 gear is most used
the idea on the trunk is you couldn't steal stuff since you need to have the key - say top is down.



A lot of Italian idiosyncrasies make sense when you live with them for a while.

 

Every Mondial I ever heard of has some measure of difficulty getting into second gear until it warms up, I read about a mod that could be done in the transmission that involved drilling a hole somewhere to let pressure out, but this stiffness resolves itself within 5 minutes of driving.
Alden

 

I've had this situation rectified when I had my shift linkage adjusted. 2nd gear always works for me, even cold. I've read what @Alden said too, but never had the opportunity to drill the hole nor verify it's content (attached)

My honest opinion is linkage gets misadjusted very easily, and the hole patches that. As for your 4th question, do you mean you need the acc on so the ABS unit is activated?

 

The second gear issue when cold is not Mondial related. That generation of Ferrari gear boxes' construction leads to it. The second's selector rod slides into a dead-ended hole and when the oil is cold, creates a hydraulic lock as the thick cold oil takes time to escape, which becomes much easier when it's hot = more fluid. I drilled a relieve hole for the trapped oil and it shifts just fine when cold. And yes, if the linkage is out of adjustment, it will creates problems. That's expected though.

 

I very much enjoy the Dog Legged Pattern, the Pantera had it, the Porsche 928 had it, my 328, 348 had it, I prefer it actually

 

To my understanding, the pop-up command relay u's coil is under power when the lights are off (such as when parked) = it will draw a constant (roughly) 0.16A. It might drain your battery over a 2+ week period.
I would recommend to disconnect the battery via the built-in switch should you not use your car over a certain period of time.
I think the reason for this is so that the pop-up retract after the lights are switched off, even with ignition off.
I am happy to learn of my reading of the diagrams is mistaken

 

In my experience, vehicles are designed with a 'dog leg' shift pattern for one (or more) of four reasons:
1) The car (or its transmission in another application) is genuinely expected to be used on the track, where 1st gear is never used (besides in the pits) and shifts between 2nd and 3rd are quite frequent.
2) Transmission was supplied by ZF.
3) Transmission was an adaptation of an earlier 4-speed design that already had reverse on the left, and they didn't want to add another selector mechanism.
4) Car is a truck in which you're not expected to routinely use 1st gear (probably labeled L or G rather than 1).

Currently three out of four vehicles I own have this shift pattern. Our Mondials (and presumably every 5-speed manual Ferrari, except the 400, which I'm pretty sure has a more conventional shift pattern) obviously fall into #1, as does my Porsche. Limited-production cars like '70s Maseratis and the Alfa Montreal fall into #2, but also mass-produced '80s Maseratis and some '70s BMWs happened to used the same family of transmissions from ZF. I can't think of a good example of #3, but I know I've seen it somewhere; maybe a sporty version of an old rear-engined Fiat or VW, or maybe a Nissan product? My '71 Mercedes L508D truck, among others, falls into #4, labeled L-1-2-3-4 (rather than 1-2-3-4-5) in the case of my old truck.

Ha; I didn't know the 'T did this, but I've actually thought about modifying the wiring of my 3.2 to do precisely this—so I can leave the windows down when it's parked briefly somewhere on a hot day—putting valuables out of sight in the trunk may satisfy some people, but I'd rather people not have access to the trunk just by reaching in the window of my parked car. (Or is it not a 'T thing but rather a cabriolet thing? Is yours a cab? Because that would make sense, for the same reason.)

I've read of this quirk of the 'T (and 348) gearbox, and have to wonder if it's actually a deliberate design choice to prevent people from slamming it into second gear (and destroying the synchros) before it's fully warmed up. Lots of old cars (but Italian cars especially, because they tend to have a bigger gap in the ratios between 1st and 2nd) have worn-out second gear synchros because people can't be patient upshifting into 2nd when the oil is cold.

I don't have a 'T, and I don't know if it uses the same ATE Mk II ABS system that was optional on my 3.2 (which I also don't have), but despite the various quirks of that ABS system, this has got to be a myth. Maybe you need to have the ignition on to run the pump to bleed the rear circuit(s), but certainly not the engine running. (That said, lots of modern cars with Bosch ABS have a similar 'requirement,' in many cases requiring a special proprietary tool to run the pump and shuttle the ABS valves, but in many cases it's not ACTUALLY necessary if you're okay with a tiny quantity of fluid in the valves not getting flushed out when you change the fluid. Even if you've installed new hardware that has air trapped in the valves, you can often purge it just by bleeding manually and then stomping on the brakes hard enough to invoke the ABS.)

I just checked my 3.2 (by which I mean with a multimeter on relay u—haven't actually reviewed the wiring diagram), and this NOT the case, unless you leave the running lights on (in which case you have bigger loads than one relay coil draining your battery ).