FERRARI

F40

The Ferrari F40 was unveiled in July 1987 to celebrate Ferrari's 40th anniversary, and it became the final new model launched while company founder Enzo Ferrari was still alive, giving it a unique place in the marque's history. Conceived as a road-legal evolution of the limited 288 GTO, the Ferrari F40 was styled by Pininfarina under Leonardo Fioravanti and built around a tubular steel frame reinforced with composite panels. Weight obsessed its engineers: the Ferrari F40 was the first production Ferrari to make extensive use of carbon fibre, Kevlar and aluminium, its plexiglass windows sliding rather than winding and its stripped cabin lacking carpets, door handles or a radio. Power came from a mid-mounted 2.9-litre twin-turbocharged V8 producing around 478 horsepower, enough to make the Ferrari F40 the first road car officially capable of exceeding 200 mph, with a top speed of about 201 mph. Ferrari originally planned just 400 cars at roughly US$400,000 each, but demand was so intense that production continued to 1992, by which time 1,311 had been built, 213 of them for the United States. Raw, savage and utterly analogue, the Ferrari F40 is today regarded as one of the greatest supercars ever made and a blue-chip collector icon worth millions.