Picture, in your mind, a Ferrari F40. It’s probably wearing a shiny coat of rosso corsa, right? That’s how they all left the factory after all — or, if rumors are to be believed, how all but a small handful left the factory. And to be sure, it’s a great color for a legendary car! But if you’re looking for something different, and a little less red, there’s a very special F40 in French racing blue headed to RM Sotheby’s 2019 Paris auction, scheduled for Feb. 6.
Even better? It’s a F40 LM — the car’s lightweight, high-power racing incarnation. And to back up its extremely distinctive (and in our opinion, extremely cool) period livery, it actually has a decent bit of racing provenance tucked under its belt.
F40 LMs don’t come up for sale very often, but they're intriguing machines. Though the F40 can trace its roots back to Ferrari’s racing programs (it is a sort of technical and spiritual successor to the aborted Group B-bound 288 GTO Evoluzione), the Scuderia never actually built a race version of the car in-house. Instead, it gave the Italian constructor Michelotto authorization to develop the car that would come to be known as the F40 LM (for Le Mans, naturally).
To turn the race-inspired road car into a road car-based race car, the interior was stripped down to the bare minimum, the chassis stiffened and the bodywork modified; even the F40’s signature pop-up headlights were sacrificed in pursuit of lower weight and less drag. It worked: Curb weight was cut to just 2,315 pounds. That’s a little less than a modern MX-5! Paired with a 700-plus-hp output squeezed out of the F40’s tuned 2.9-liter V8, you’re looking at a car that has to be, and we’re going to go out on a limb here because we’ve never actually driven one, quite a handful.
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