Ferrari F40
TIPPED BY: TRISTAN JUDGE
We featured the F40 in this top slot as recently as 2018, when it was already a million-pound car. Have they really moved up again since then? It would appear so, says Tristan Judge. ‘There was a peak around 2015 and values settled after that, but less so than many other Ferraris. They were steady around £1m to £1.3m since 2017 but the last 18 months has seen another rise and in May one broke the $2m barrier in America. And it’s still the king of poster cars.’
Tristan thinks the buyers are getting younger and perhaps aspire towards the F40 not just because it’s from their generation, but as a much more appealing driving machine than a Fifties or Sixties Ferrari of the same value. ‘People drive Countaches and an F40 is more useable than one of them,’ he says. ‘They’re also still quite simple and raw; direct and uncomplicated. The driving experience smacks you in the face, but in a good way!’
Ferrari developed the F40 from the 288GTO, using a mix of aluminium, Kevlar and carbon fibre for the body and polycarbonate for the windows, keeping the weight down to 1350kg and ensuring live-wire performance with a 470bhp twin-turbo V8 behind the cabin. Only 400 were planned, but between 1987 and 1992 Ferrari discovered enough wealthy enthusiasts (or speculators) to sell 1311 of them, which kept values well below the levels of the less famous but rarer 288GTO. Now, however, the gap is closing.
‘The only thing Ferrari got wrong was building too many of them,’ says Tristan. ‘But there are hundreds more billionaires in this world every year, and suddenly just over a thousand surviving F40s might not be enough. After all, it’ll always have something over an F50 or an Enzo, so who knows how far it will go?’