The Ferrari F40 is a supercar before it even turns a wheel in anger. It’s the last car that Enzo himself green-lit for production. It had roots that stretched back through the 288 GTO, itself a monster of a machine. The F40 was meant to be a stripped-down machine that was ready to brawl at a moment’s notice, the ultimate Spartan screamer, and it was. It would hit 100 miles an hour in the time most normal vehicles were hitting sixty. It’d run nearly twelve-flat in the quarter. It’s top speed flirted with the magical 200 mile per hour mark. If you were expecting the cost of entry to be all about luxury and pampering, the Porsche 959 was your bag. The F40 was light, stripped and ready to party in the kind of way that only ends with the cops getting called halfway through the night.

What you are looking at isn’t a Ferrari F40. The shape is correct, yes. Most of the details seem to be accurate…but the noise is the biggest dead giveaway. The Ferrari’s 2.9L twin-turbocharged V8 doesn’t burble like a normal V8…it shrieks, if anything. This car burbles in anger, courtesy of a 4.0L Lexus-sourced V8. The whole car is a replica, built by Steve Cox of New Zealand over five years beginning in 1997. The 4.0L backs up to a Quaife six-speed sequential and it’s that transmission that is keeping the F40 from becoming a 1,000+ horsepower monster. As it is, the Lexus mill is being breathed on to the tune of 15 pounds of boost and other than traction control, no other nannies are on the car.

Ferrari probably hate this car. Enzo’s reaction would’ve sounded like Mt. Vesuvius going off like a bomb, we suspect. In our eyes, Cox has built his own copy of a car that is pretty much unobtanium for most of the world, made it raucous and has no trouble sending it up a hillclimb or whipping it around a circuit. We totally approve.

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