Daily Driver F40
07-11-2009, 05:40 PM
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QUOTE
Just Driving Around in a 200-mph Classic Ferrari
The woman appears at her front door like an overladen galleon, listing over the threshold as the sails of her dressing gown billow upward to reveal a sensible nightgown beneath. She is not happy. It's 9:02 a.m. and a Ferrari F40 has just interrupted her breakfast.
For some, an F40 goes down very badly with muesli and coffee, particularly if there's a suspicion that it's going a little beyond the 30-mph speed limit. It's not, and delivery vans regularly buzz past here at twice that speed, but they don't have a 472-horsepower, twin-turbo 3.0-liter V8.
Breakfast of Champions
As the F40 goes for another pass through the neighborhood while we take some pictures, the Galleon opens her mouth to complain. "Can you ask him to slow down...snark, crackle, rarrrrrrr," she seems to say, as she finishes her sentence in terrifying lip-synch with the Ferrari's mechanical music. Paul Bailey, F40 owner and philanthropist, gets the message and we pack up and leave before we're chased away by a band of angry residents waving flaming torches fashioned from the Daily Mail.
What the denizens of this formerly sleepy little English village don't realize is that they've just witnessed a motoring miracle — a Ferrari F40 on a public road. Many of the 1,315 Ferrari F40s built between 1987 and 1992 are living out their lives as showpieces in a museum, buyer bait in a car dealership, or perhaps cocooned in a hermetically sealed plastic bubble within a centrally heated garage.
Bailey's outlook is very different. "I take this car everywhere," he says. "I can't understand why some people own a supercar and don't drive the thing." Bailey's F40 is used for occasional commuting, going to and from track days (no trailers here) and for charity fund-raising events. "For a donation, I take people out for the trip of a lifetime; the F40 always sells out faster than any other car at every event," Bailey tells us.
On the face of it, charity work might not seem like an appropriate use for the last Ferrari model personally commissioned by Enzo Ferrari. But you have to give a lot of yourself to get the best out of an F40 on the street. Crucially, you have to give respect. "If you don't respect it," says Bailey, "this Ferrari will throw you off the road." And there are enough lurid tales of death and decapitation in the history of the F40 to support his point of view.
Racing Through Traffic
Like a competition car, it's noisy in here. Even though Bailey's has spent the last 15 minutes just pottering along country lanes to warm up the engine, conversation has been tricky. A couple of times we have both done the engine lip-synch thing, frowned at each other and moved the conversation along with hand gestures.
Finally we find something equating to a main road in these parts, and Bailey finds the gas pedal. In three seconds we've caught up with a clot of cars and trucks, and half a second later we're going past them. As we overtake, traffic actually moves over. This isn't the grudging and inept shuffle you sometimes see when an ambulance hoves into view; it's an ordered and synchronized movement. It's as if everyone has glanced in their mirror at the same time, clocked the harbinger of the apocalypse and thought it best to get the hell out of the way.
"If I back off now," Bailey says as he manhandles the stiff shift linkage into 4th gear, "the car will just swap directions." Ah yes, lift-off oversteer, another racing car trait.
Once we're past the traffic, Bailey lifts off the gas, brakes and downshifts through the gears. There's a sound like artillery fire as the V8 works through the overrun. "There will be flames coming out of the exhausts now," Bailey says nonchalantly, as if it's a normal thing for a road car to do.
The Whole F40 Thing
The F40 arrived in July 1987 to mark the 40th anniversary of Ferrari (F40: Ferrari 40). Its design owed much to the Ferrari 288 GTO introduced at the 1984 Geneva Auto Show, which was meant to be a response to the recently announced all-wheel-drive, twin-turbo Porsche 959. The 288 GTO was homologated for Group B, a new formula for rallying and road racing, and it looked like a Ferrari 328 GTB but had a tubular space frame, a longitudinally mounted twin-turbo V8 and lightweight composite bodywork. Though the Group B rules were changed, the frenzy of manufacturer interest they created eventually led to a new breed of supercars.
Developed from a group of five 288 GTO Evolution models, the Ferrari F40 went into production in 1987. It held the record as the world's fastest production car until 1989, when the Ruf CTR Yellowbird (based on a turbocharged Porsche 911) nicked it with a run at 211 mph. At the time, there was a great debate about whether the Ferrari F40 was a better car than the Porsche 959 (just as the Ferrari Enzo would later be rivaled by the Porsche Carrera GT), but there was one aspect of performance in which the Ferrari inevitably prevailed, and this was financial speculation.
The list price for the Ferrari F40 in 1987 was $318,700, while the 959 cost $239,400. Such was the demand from would-be owners that the Porsche regularly doubled in value by the time it was ready for the road, yet a brand-new Ferrari F40 could command anything up to $1.3M. Just over 330 examples of the 959 were built, while Ferrari's plans to cap production at a similar number (Porsche lost money on every 959 it sold) were undercut by the Ferrari mania that followed in the wake of Enzo Ferrari's death in 1988. Prospective owners offered Ferrari more and more money to build just one more F40 that eventually 1,315 were built (210 in U.S. specification). The financial windfall inspired the creation of the vast array of supercar manufacturers that we know today.
The F40 Ownership Experience
Paul Bailey hasn't owned his F40 from new, but his buying experience was by no means ordinary either. Instead of a trip to the Ferrari test track at Fiorano to be personally instructed in the care and feeding of a supercar, it began with a trip to a modest housing estate and some haggling over a cup of tea. His F40 with 15,000 miles on the odometer cost him $165,000 four years ago, and even after a $43,000 refit to bring it up to concours standard and evidence of significant sums since, it's still worth a lot more than the money that's been lavished on it.
To give you an idea, Sports Car Market puts values in the range of $275,000-$375,000, with prices significantly higher in Europe. A good Ferrari F40 that's ready to use without imminent major expense is going to cost at least $330,000, and you'll need another $80,000 if you want a former concours winner like Bailey's F40.
Such prices have turned away the kind of crowd that has the philosophy of "buy the car even if you can't afford to maintain it." So the chances are relatively good that you'll turn up a well-maintained F40, unlike other used Ferraris. In the U.K., an annual service costs $1,300, which is not an unfamiliar figure if you own a big German sedan, but the $3,000 headlight replacement might remind you that the F40 moves in expensive circles. Naturally the cam belts require replacement every two years and the massive 335/30ZR18 rear tires can get fried pretty quickly.
Around the Block
One Ferrari F40 you're unlikely to see for sale is Bailey's. It's part of a fleet of exotica he owns that also includes a Ferrari Enzo, yet for Bailey, the F40 remains the epitome of its breed. "It's the best supercar there is," he says. "All F40 owners are so lucky."
Contemporary pundits used to describe the Ferrari F40 as "Formula 1 in drag," and the cockpit certainly smells as though this car should be on the grid, with a thick whiff of petrol and hot engine oil wafting about the interior. We're sitting in thinly padded carbon-fiber racing seats with a sparse dash in front of us. Bailey holds the Momo steering wheel and works the shift lever through the traditional Ferrari open gate. The engine revs, the turbos spool up and Bailey keeps it all spinning with quick shifts. The result is acceleration guaranteed to make you swear.
Good luck with that peaceful breakfast.
The woman appears at her front door like an overladen galleon, listing over the threshold as the sails of her dressing gown billow upward to reveal a sensible nightgown beneath. She is not happy. It's 9:02 a.m. and a Ferrari F40 has just interrupted her breakfast.
For some, an F40 goes down very badly with muesli and coffee, particularly if there's a suspicion that it's going a little beyond the 30-mph speed limit. It's not, and delivery vans regularly buzz past here at twice that speed, but they don't have a 472-horsepower, twin-turbo 3.0-liter V8.
Breakfast of Champions
As the F40 goes for another pass through the neighborhood while we take some pictures, the Galleon opens her mouth to complain. "Can you ask him to slow down...snark, crackle, rarrrrrrr," she seems to say, as she finishes her sentence in terrifying lip-synch with the Ferrari's mechanical music. Paul Bailey, F40 owner and philanthropist, gets the message and we pack up and leave before we're chased away by a band of angry residents waving flaming torches fashioned from the Daily Mail.
What the denizens of this formerly sleepy little English village don't realize is that they've just witnessed a motoring miracle — a Ferrari F40 on a public road. Many of the 1,315 Ferrari F40s built between 1987 and 1992 are living out their lives as showpieces in a museum, buyer bait in a car dealership, or perhaps cocooned in a hermetically sealed plastic bubble within a centrally heated garage.
Bailey's outlook is very different. "I take this car everywhere," he says. "I can't understand why some people own a supercar and don't drive the thing." Bailey's F40 is used for occasional commuting, going to and from track days (no trailers here) and for charity fund-raising events. "For a donation, I take people out for the trip of a lifetime; the F40 always sells out faster than any other car at every event," Bailey tells us.
On the face of it, charity work might not seem like an appropriate use for the last Ferrari model personally commissioned by Enzo Ferrari. But you have to give a lot of yourself to get the best out of an F40 on the street. Crucially, you have to give respect. "If you don't respect it," says Bailey, "this Ferrari will throw you off the road." And there are enough lurid tales of death and decapitation in the history of the F40 to support his point of view.
Racing Through Traffic
Like a competition car, it's noisy in here. Even though Bailey's has spent the last 15 minutes just pottering along country lanes to warm up the engine, conversation has been tricky. A couple of times we have both done the engine lip-synch thing, frowned at each other and moved the conversation along with hand gestures.
Finally we find something equating to a main road in these parts, and Bailey finds the gas pedal. In three seconds we've caught up with a clot of cars and trucks, and half a second later we're going past them. As we overtake, traffic actually moves over. This isn't the grudging and inept shuffle you sometimes see when an ambulance hoves into view; it's an ordered and synchronized movement. It's as if everyone has glanced in their mirror at the same time, clocked the harbinger of the apocalypse and thought it best to get the hell out of the way.
"If I back off now," Bailey says as he manhandles the stiff shift linkage into 4th gear, "the car will just swap directions." Ah yes, lift-off oversteer, another racing car trait.
Once we're past the traffic, Bailey lifts off the gas, brakes and downshifts through the gears. There's a sound like artillery fire as the V8 works through the overrun. "There will be flames coming out of the exhausts now," Bailey says nonchalantly, as if it's a normal thing for a road car to do.
The Whole F40 Thing
The F40 arrived in July 1987 to mark the 40th anniversary of Ferrari (F40: Ferrari 40). Its design owed much to the Ferrari 288 GTO introduced at the 1984 Geneva Auto Show, which was meant to be a response to the recently announced all-wheel-drive, twin-turbo Porsche 959. The 288 GTO was homologated for Group B, a new formula for rallying and road racing, and it looked like a Ferrari 328 GTB but had a tubular space frame, a longitudinally mounted twin-turbo V8 and lightweight composite bodywork. Though the Group B rules were changed, the frenzy of manufacturer interest they created eventually led to a new breed of supercars.
Developed from a group of five 288 GTO Evolution models, the Ferrari F40 went into production in 1987. It held the record as the world's fastest production car until 1989, when the Ruf CTR Yellowbird (based on a turbocharged Porsche 911) nicked it with a run at 211 mph. At the time, there was a great debate about whether the Ferrari F40 was a better car than the Porsche 959 (just as the Ferrari Enzo would later be rivaled by the Porsche Carrera GT), but there was one aspect of performance in which the Ferrari inevitably prevailed, and this was financial speculation.
The list price for the Ferrari F40 in 1987 was $318,700, while the 959 cost $239,400. Such was the demand from would-be owners that the Porsche regularly doubled in value by the time it was ready for the road, yet a brand-new Ferrari F40 could command anything up to $1.3M. Just over 330 examples of the 959 were built, while Ferrari's plans to cap production at a similar number (Porsche lost money on every 959 it sold) were undercut by the Ferrari mania that followed in the wake of Enzo Ferrari's death in 1988. Prospective owners offered Ferrari more and more money to build just one more F40 that eventually 1,315 were built (210 in U.S. specification). The financial windfall inspired the creation of the vast array of supercar manufacturers that we know today.
The F40 Ownership Experience
Paul Bailey hasn't owned his F40 from new, but his buying experience was by no means ordinary either. Instead of a trip to the Ferrari test track at Fiorano to be personally instructed in the care and feeding of a supercar, it began with a trip to a modest housing estate and some haggling over a cup of tea. His F40 with 15,000 miles on the odometer cost him $165,000 four years ago, and even after a $43,000 refit to bring it up to concours standard and evidence of significant sums since, it's still worth a lot more than the money that's been lavished on it.
To give you an idea, Sports Car Market puts values in the range of $275,000-$375,000, with prices significantly higher in Europe. A good Ferrari F40 that's ready to use without imminent major expense is going to cost at least $330,000, and you'll need another $80,000 if you want a former concours winner like Bailey's F40.
Such prices have turned away the kind of crowd that has the philosophy of "buy the car even if you can't afford to maintain it." So the chances are relatively good that you'll turn up a well-maintained F40, unlike other used Ferraris. In the U.K., an annual service costs $1,300, which is not an unfamiliar figure if you own a big German sedan, but the $3,000 headlight replacement might remind you that the F40 moves in expensive circles. Naturally the cam belts require replacement every two years and the massive 335/30ZR18 rear tires can get fried pretty quickly.
Around the Block
One Ferrari F40 you're unlikely to see for sale is Bailey's. It's part of a fleet of exotica he owns that also includes a Ferrari Enzo, yet for Bailey, the F40 remains the epitome of its breed. "It's the best supercar there is," he says. "All F40 owners are so lucky."
Contemporary pundits used to describe the Ferrari F40 as "Formula 1 in drag," and the cockpit certainly smells as though this car should be on the grid, with a thick whiff of petrol and hot engine oil wafting about the interior. We're sitting in thinly padded carbon-fiber racing seats with a sparse dash in front of us. Bailey holds the Momo steering wheel and works the shift lever through the traditional Ferrari open gate. The engine revs, the turbos spool up and Bailey keeps it all spinning with quick shifts. The result is acceleration guaranteed to make you swear.
Good luck with that peaceful breakfast.
