Ferrari F40
by Dave on Aug.12, 2006, under Cars
Brand New Price: $500,000 – Price Now: $750,000,000
The Ferrari F40 was THE car of the 1980s supercar boom. Its combination of towering performance, aggressive styling and outstanding handling hailed it as one of the best of the era. But it also benefited from the speculative boom in supercar values that drove up demand to unsustainable levels. Just over 1300 Ferrari F40s were produced over a period of 3 years, making it one of the highest volume ultimate supercars that Ferrari have ever produced…. and still my favourite. I’d have it over any Ferrari any day! The F40 had a light weight of 1100 kg and very high power output of 478 hp @ 7000 rpm. This gave the F40 outstanding acceleration, and a top speed that wouldn’t embarrass most supercars of today.
Road tests have produced 0-60 times as low as 3.6 seconds, with 0-100mph in 7.6 seconds, just out performing anything on the road at that time. From the time it was introduced in 1987, it held the record as the world’s fastest production car, with a top speed of 201 mph; only to be broken by the RUF CTR “Yellowbird” doing 211 mph in 1989 – although the F40 could still outrun the RUF to 60 mph.
The F40 was in the most literal sense designed as the succesor to the company’s GTO supercar, but the project’s meaning ran deeper. At nintey years old, Enzo Ferrari was keenly aware that his life was coming to an end, and was somewhat dissapointed that Ferrari’s dominance in international motorsport had faded somewhat over the years. As a result, Enzo wanted a new pet project put into the pipelines, something that could remind the world of the company’s capabilities as a manufacturer as well as provide both a competitor to the Porsche 959 and come to be his seminal masterpiece; the company’s impending 40th anniversary provided just the right occasion for the car to debut.
The plan was simple: create a vehicle that combined the company’s best technologies into a no-frills sports car that would come as close as possible to being a full fledged race vehicle while still retaining the neccesary equipment to be a street-legal product.
