The Tyre That Did Not Exist
Ferrari had a problem no supplier had solved.
Ferrari F40
No power steering. No servo on the brakes. No traction control. Everything this car does, the driver has to ask for.
The Racing Car That Had Nowhere Left To Race
Five 288 GTO Evoluzione development cars sat in Maranello in 1986, finished and idle. Nicola Materazzi had engineered them on Saturdays, outside the working week, because permission had been granted on no other terms. They were built for Group B. That season the FIA abolished it.
The Evoluzione did not need a series. It needed a number plate. Enzo Ferrari let Materazzi hand-pick his own engineers and gave him eleven months to turn a dead race car into a road car, ready for the summer of 1987.
The occasion was the marque's fortieth anniversary. The car was presented at the Civic Centre in Maranello on 21 July 1987, and the date was met. Ferrari planned four hundred. Demand did not respect the plan, and more than thirteen hundred were eventually built, this one among the last of them.
Every surface on this car is doing a job. None of them are doing you a favour.
Every Gram Had To Justify Itself
Ferrari built the body from materials that belonged in aerospace and motorsport rather than a road car showroom. Kevlar, carbon fibre and aluminium for the panels, at a fraction of the mass of steel. Eleven pieces in total, because the front and rear are each a single vast section that lifts clear to expose the whole mechanical car beneath.
The shape came from Pininfarina, drawn by Pietro Camardella, and it borrowed only a cabin profile and a satin black side crease from the 288 GTO that preceded it. Everything else was new, pulled tight over the mechanical package and pierced wherever air needed to enter or leave. The drag coefficient came out at 0.34, a modest figure, and entirely beside the point.
The F40 was never built to slip through the air. The wing is the part everyone remembers and the part that was never decoration: integral, full width, high mounted, there because a car this fast has to be pressed down onto its tyres. That it also became the silhouette of a decade was a consequence, not an intention.
There was one colour on the order form. Every F40 built for series production left Maranello in red, and this car has never worn anything else.
You hear the turbochargers before you hear the engine. Both arrive later than you expect.
What 1.1 Bar Feels Like
Hear the V8
2.9L Twin-Turbo · 478 hp · 7,000 rpm
Almost every great Ferrari before this one used a V12. The F40 does not. It carries a 2.9 litre V8, enlarged from the 288 GTO, mounted longitudinally behind the cabin and boosted hard by a pair of water-cooled turbochargers.
Below three thousand revolutions it is mild, almost apologetic, and gives away nothing of what it is holding back. Then the boost arrives, all of it, inside a few hundred revolutions. The car does not build speed so much as change state. Nothing about the delivery is progressive and nothing about it was meant to be.
The published output was a decision rather than a limit. The same architecture, barely altered, produced well over 700 hp in the LM cars campaigned later in the decade. Three pipes leave the tail: the outer pair from the cylinder banks, the centre from the wastegate.
It was the last turbocharged engine Ferrari built for the road until the California T of 2014, twenty-two years after this car left Maranello.
Twin IHIThe turbos double the air the V8 breathes. Everything else about the car exists to survive it.
From the outside you cannot see in. That is the last thing this car makes easy.
Nothing Was Left Out By Accident
The GateFive speeds, an open metal gate, and a shift that is heard as much as felt.
There is no carpet, no sound insulation, no glovebox, no stereo and no leather anywhere in it. The doors have no panels in the conventional sense and no inner handle, only a fabric strap where the handle would be. Every one of those absences bought back weight from a car that had none to spare.
A grey felt dash and a Momo wheel with the Prancing Horse at its centre. A row of red rocker switches. Drilled aluminium pedals. Bare woven Kevlar across the sills and floor, left unpainted because paint weighs something and because covering it would have hidden the point.
The seats are the car's signature: fixed composite shells, thinly padded, trimmed in cloth to match the bodywork exactly as the order sheet called for. Ferrari fitted air conditioning, and it is the only concession in the entire cabin.
Everything so far is true of every F40 built. What follows is true of this one.
Supplied To Britain, In Its First Paint
Built in 1992, in the final year of F40 road car production, this car is in the care of only its second owner. Its odometer reads 24,877 [km or miles, to be confirmed]. It wears the Rosso Corsa it left Maranello in, its first and only paint, over the red cloth seats it was delivered with.
It was supplied new to the United Kingdom. Only 78 F40s were delivered there, and 58 of them were catalyst cars like this one. In a model where so many examples have crossed borders repeatedly, a known first market is where a traceable history begins.
From 1990, as emissions rules tightened, Ferrari began fitting European F40s with catalytic converters, and adjustable suspension arrived as an option soon after. This car has the first and was ordered without the second. It keeps the fixed-height suspension the F40 was engineered around, and none of the hydraulics the adjustable system adds. Specialists who have handled many F40s tend to rate the later catalyst cars well for build quality, and among collectors "cat, non-adjust" is a recognised specification in its own right.
It is offered as fully original and accident-free, in excellent condition after careful ownership and consistent maintenance. [Service history, book pack, tool kit and spare key: contents to be confirmed.] [Ferrari Classiche certification: status to be confirmed.]
Cat, Non-AdjustCatalysts from the factory, and the fixed suspension the car was engineered around.
The Numbers, As Maranello Published Them
Engine
TypeRear mid-mounted, longitudinal, 90° V8, twin-turbocharged
Factory designationTipo F120D, the catalyst version of the F120A
Total displacement2,936.25 cc
Bore and stroke82 × 69.5 mm (Ferrari also publishes 81.9 × 69.5 mm)
Unitary displacement367.03 cc
Compression ratio7.7 : 1
Maximum power356 kW, 478 hp at 7,000 rpm (Ferrari figure; also published as 478 PS, which equals 471 hp)
Power per litre163 hp/l
Maximum torque577 Nm, 425 lb ft at 4,000 rpm
Valve actuationTwin overhead camshafts per bank, four valves per cylinder
InductionTwin IHI water-cooled turbochargers, Behr intercoolers, 1.1 bar
Fuel feedWeber-Marelli IAW electronic injection
IgnitionWeber-Marelli electronic, single plug per cylinder
Catalytic convertersFactory-fitted, one per cylinder bank
LubricationDry sump
ClutchTwin-plate
Transmission
GearboxFive-speed manual, gated, plus reverse
DriveRear-wheel drive
Chassis
FrameTubular steel with composite structure
Front suspensionIndependent, unequal-length wishbones, coil springs over telescopic dampers, anti-roll bar. Fixed ride height, ordered without the optional adjustable system
Rear suspensionIndependent, unequal-length wishbones, coil springs over telescopic dampers, anti-roll bar
BrakesDiscs, no servo assistance, no ABS
SteeringRack and pinion, unassisted
Traction controlNone
Fuel capacity120 litres
Front tyres245/40 ZR 17
Rear tyres335/35 ZR 17
Bodywork
TypeTwo-seater berlinetta
ConstructionKevlar, carbon fibre and aluminium composite panels, eleven pieces
Length4,358 mm (Ferrari figure; other published sources state 4,430 mm)
Width1,970 mm
Height1,124 mm
Wheelbase2,450 mm
Front track1,594 mm
Rear track1,606 mm
Weight1,100 kg dry (Ferrari figure; European kerb weight has been published at 1,254 kg)
Drag coefficientCd 0.34
Performance
Top speed324 km/h (factory claim; independent testing at Nardò recorded 321 km/h)
0 to 100 km/h4.1 sec
0 to 400 m11.9 sec
0 to 1,000 m20.9 sec
Production
Built1987 to 1992
Total1,311 to 1,315, depending on the source. Ferrari's own records cite 1,311. The difference concerns how the competition variants are counted.
Price
PriceOn application
All figures are period factory data unless otherwise noted. Where published sources differ, both have been recorded. All details are subject to buyer verification.
The Car, In Full
Photographed as it stands today, in the condition in which it will be handed over.
Six Things Worth Knowing
The F40 made 78 hp more than the 288 GTO before it, and nothing on sale in 1987 could hold it to the road. Nicola Materazzi went to Pirelli's head of development, Mario Mezzanotte, whom he had known since the Lancia rally years. Pirelli built a carcass from lightweight materials including Kevlar, drawing on five seasons of Formula One, and gave it an asymmetric tread. The result was the P Zero. It was created for this car, and it went on to define a generation of performance tyres.
Ten Per Cent
Most were bought by people who never intended to drive them.
By 1990 it was estimated that only one F40 in ten was being used at all. The rest went directly into storage, bought by speculators who watched prices climb to many times the list figure before the bubble broke. That decade left the model with a provenance problem it has never fully shaken: cars that changed hands repeatedly, on paper, without anyone recording what was done to them. Thirty-four years later, a short ownership chain and a known first market are what separate a car with a history from a car with a story.
What Nardò Measured
Ferrari's top speed claim did not survive independent testing.
Ferrari published 324 km/h. When Auto, Motor und Sport took two factory cars to the Nardò ring, neither exceeded 321 km/h. The F40 never held the outright record it was credited with. What it held instead, for years, was a different title: the fastest car a private buyer could actually order. Three kilometres per hour has never changed what the car is.
A Big Go-Kart With A Plastic Body
The most damning review came from a rival engineer.
Gordon Murray, five years before his own road car appeared, took the F40 apart in print. He called the chassis fifties technology, said he could feel it flexing on circuit, and described the car as a big go-kart with a plastic body. He also said this: it is the lack of weight that makes it exciting. Both halves of the verdict have aged into praise.
Mugello, June 1992
Sixty-eight of them stood in the rain, and one was not red.
In the year this car was built, Ferrari and the German owners' club gathered sixty-eight F40s in Italy for four days across Maranello, Fiorano and Mugello. It rained at Mugello, and owners waited in it while the cars were lined up for photographs that are now part of the model's archive. Piero Ferrari drove in the rally, in an F40. Luca di Montezemolo stood at the head of the line.
The Last Approval
Enzo Ferrari never saw what came after this car.
He had been building cars under his own name for forty years when he signed off the F40, which is where the name comes from. He died thirteen months after its unveiling. It was the last car he ever approved, and the last statement he ever made about what a Ferrari was supposed to be.
Where This Car Is Expected
Originality decides entry at the concours, and condition decides it on the road. This car is offered with both. What follows is the calendar it opens.
Eligibility for any given running is always at the discretion of the organiser and should be confirmed directly with them.
Enquire
Thirty-four years on, and still the car it left Maranello as.