Got a favourite supercar? A dream machine from your childhood that you hope one day to afford? Although it's not on my list of cars to own, my favourite supercar ever has to be the Ferrari F40. This was a machine that helped to redefine the goal posts of supercar performance during the arms race for production cars to break the 200 mph barrier in the 1980s.
The first time a I laid eyes on a Ferrari F40 in person was in the summer of 1990. It wasn't the road car I had previously seen featured on the pages of Road & Track magazine, but the brand new race car version, the F40 LM.
Back in the late 80s, GT racing in Europe was at an all time low. With the demise of the Group 5 category, all top flight sports car racing concentrated solely on prototypes and there were very few GT races to enter with the F40 LM. The most interesting and competitive GT series at the time was in American in the IMSA Camel GTO category with its factory Ford, Nissan and Mazda race teams.
Ferrari France debuted the car in October of 1988 at Laguna Seca in the hands of a rather talented, upcoming race driver, Jean Alesi. The car qualified an excellent third and Jean actually led the opening part of the race, before succumbing to the might of Audi's firebreathing Quattro 80s. At the finish, he was classified a respectable third place.
For the 1990 season, two F40 LMs were entered into the IMSA GTO class, piloted by such marquis drivers as Jean Pierre Jabouille, Jacques Laffite, Eric Van de Poele and Hurley Haywood. Although the cars failed to take a win that year, they regularly featured on the podium, or scored DNFs… it was one or the other in most cases.
By the end of the 1990 season, Ferrari France's funding had dried up, and the cars disappeared from the race track to gather dust in storage for the rest of their lives. It seems that of the 19 original F40 LMs constructed, only a handful ever turned a wheel in anger on the race track. The rest of them were relegated to private collections around the world.
The F40LM later became a fixture of the BPR series in the mid 1990s and was one of the only cars to challenge the original Mclaren F1 GTR race car in its early years of racing from 1994 to '96… but that's a different story we'll save for another time!
:R