The Ferrari F40 was the perfect car | Frankel’s Insight

It’s strange that it should be so, because so much of it is wrong. I prefer V12s to V8s, natural aspiration to turbocharging and engines placed ahead of, not behind their driver. It is very hard to explain to someone who hasn’t driven one, but if you have no explanation is necessary.

It is one of those cars that is so elemental that on a couple of occasions I’ve derived at least as big a kick from seeing the faces of those who’ve just driven one for the first time as I have driving one myself.

So what is it about this car, which today is approaching its 40^th birthday — an occasion being celebrated over at The Quail this weekend in California? Funny to think, isn’t it, that the F40 is closer in time to the birth of the Morris Minor than to the present day?

I think it has something to do with childhood. When I was growing up, I didn’t want a Ferrari to be luxurious, or quiet, comfortable or anything else other than the most exciting thing on wheels. And it was. To me the F40 was then and remains today the absolute defining paradigm of what a Ferrari should be.

The things people criticised about it: the scruffy felt-topped dash, the string door pulls, the absence even of carpets, are some of the things I loved most about it. These measures were designed to do two things: save weight of course, but also communicate and in the clearest possible terms, that this was a car for serious drivers and no-one else need apply.

I can remember my first drive in one, and what a way it was to be introduced. It was on a road that spears north across the North Yorkshire moors and if you time it right, you can have the place to yourself. I was, of course, nervous. Anyone would be. But I had particular reasons for the heartbeat pounding in my neck.

The F40 came from an era when Ferraris were not the most forgiving cars to sling about. The Testarossa could be tricky, the gorgeous 328 trickier still and the 348 trickiest of all. Unless you include the 288 GTO, one of which had once kept me far busier than I’d ever planned to be on a public road, let alone one as valuable and scarce as that. Yet the F40 had performance on a completely different plane to all of those cars.

What was it going to do if it got loose? Well, I found out the answer to that at the exit of one corner when the turbos cut in just a touch sooner and faster than I had expected. The back kicked out. But it wasn’t that sickening slew you’d get in a 348 that told you it was never coming back long before the words ‘opposite lock’ had even formed in your brain. The slide was quick, but so too was it linear, instantly signalled through that suede-rimmed Momo wheel, the kind your hands can scoop up on instinct alone.

It felt more like a Caterham, a car you’d skid about just for the fun of it, than any one of its slower yet uniformly more treacherous stablemates.

In that split second, I knew that the F40 and I understood each other, that we’d become friends and that we were going to stay that way. I’ve not been scared in one since. True, I’d not go taking liberties in one on a wet or greasy road, but so long as it is accorded the respect it undoubtedly deserves, a well set-up F40 is the treat of a lifetime to pedal hard.

The only thing that truly pains me about the F40 is that there was once briefly a time in my life when I could have bought one. At the time the car in question was ten years old, had just enough miles on it to reassure me it had not been parked all its life, had immaculate provenance and the adjustable suspension I wanted while lacked the catalytic converter I did not.

In short, it was the perfect car and, if memory serves, with a little haggling I think I could have had it for £150,000. But I didn’t have the money and given that Ferrari made over 1,300 F40s compared to just 272 288 GTOs, I thought they’d never be that rare and therefore, that valuable. Today that is a £2million car all day long. My father always said his follies came to the rescue of his investments and I wished I’d listened.

Buying an F40 in my early 30s when I was just about to start a family sounded like the ultimate folly. But life might now look rather different if I had. Hey ho, at least I’ve driven some, so still feel luckier than almost everyone…