This is, without a doubt, my new favorite Ferrari. Somebody in [LOCATION REDACTED] street parks their Ferrari F40. That duct tape on the hood is when a Yaris backed into it. Concours d’Elegance this is not.
This car comes to us from our tips email (that’s tips at jalopnik dot com) sent in from an enterprising carspotter Will, from whom we get the backstory of this fine machine. If you happen to be wondering, these cars regularly return around a million dollars at auction, thanks to their heritage of being the first production car to claim to break 200 miles per hour, and a deeper reputation of being the last great, raw, analog supercar. A high water mark for the ‘80s generation.
Honestly, and I’ll say this a bunch of times, this rules. There are many F40s in the world. (Ferrari built… let me see if I can remember this off the top of my head… 1,300 of them? Ah! So close. Ferrari claims 1,311.) Many of those F40s are in garages. Many of them live perfectly preserved, pampered lives. Let one of them be enjoyed as a car for the whole world to see.
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In any case, here’s Will, under the subject line of “My neighbor street parks a Ferrari F40.” Here it is edited slightly for legibility, and the location of the car has been redacted just so we’re you know, not shining a homing beacon onto one of the coolest cars in the world:
The subject of the email sums it up. Yes, it’s not red, but it’s a real F40. Not that many Fieros have a carbon kevlar monocoque or a twin turbo intercooled v8 in the back.
This guy parks it about 200 feet from me and gives absolutely no fucks whatsoever about anything, ever. I talked to him once for a while about it. There’s a story behind the matte vinyl wrap. If you’re sighing in relief that it’s a wrap and that the original red paint is still under it you’re not wrong (you can see it under the wrap in the picture of the door handle), but you should stop reading this email immediately so you don’t experience some sort of aneurysm.
My other neighbor backed into it and drove over the the hood with her Toyota Yaris. He replaced the hood and got it wrapped to mask the damage. Unfortunately, and I think owing to a separate incident involving either said Yaris or his garage door, he heavily scuffed the hood again, thus the flamboyantly off-color duct tape.
He told me he takes it to the track, but all I know for sure is that he uses the passenger seat to store extra wheels, tires, parts, and garbage. […] There are going to a lot of people that react in revulsion to this, but honestly, after seeing this, anybody who garages their F40 should really question the life decisions they made that led them to where they are today. Drive your cars and use them to store empty bags of flamin’ hot cheetos, people. This guy is the man, although I might have more respect for my badass Yaris driving neighbor who out-gives-no-fucks him.
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This is the part where I will voice the skepticism of my coworker Mike Ballaban who is not sure this is a real F40. He pointed out that the ride height looks weird. I believe that that’s just because the front passenger-side tire looks low. Mike also notes that the chin spoiler doesn’t look right, but I pointed out that it’s slightly coming off the body. He isn’t sure that really is a twin-turbo V8 in the back, I think it looks right from here. It’s not hard to find videos of this car doing some revs, and it sounds as legit as you’d like.
A lot of the oddness of the car comes from it being an U.S.-spec car, the slight variances of which are discussed on an old Supercars.net post.
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Honestly, the more I think about it, the less unusual this feels. This is just a guy with a 30-year-old car treating it like a 30-year-old car.
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