Ferrari F40LM / GTE

#84326

Every teenage petrolhead’s bedroom wall of the late 80’s and 90’s probably had a poster of the Ferrari F40 on it. This lightweight street legal racer with twin turbo 2.9 litre V8 engine pushed out 478bhp in normal spec and it was also the last car to be personally signed-off by Enzo Ferrari himself. In total 1311 examples were built, and it was also the first production car in the world to have a top speed in excess of 200mph.

But, more exclusive, even lighter and more powerful was the racing version of the Ferrari F40, it was called the F40LM and 19 examples were built for Ferrari by Michelotto to go racing. These were lighter at 1050kg and had power output of up to 700bhp.

Another 27 Ferrari F40’s were sold to privateer racers and built to LM specification with many Michelotto parts, these were called F40LM / GTE.

The car featured on these pages is a Ferrari F40 LM/GTE chassis #84326 and is one of the 27 privateer cars. It enjoyed a successful racing career and with some power upgrades it went on to produce 720bhp in race trim and set the lap record at Hockenheim in 1996 in the BPR Global GT series.

After its racing days were over #84326 was returned to a street legal specification and sold on whilst retaining some of its racing parts and modifications.

One of the previous owners then locked it away in a garage for 8 years before the current owner bought it in 2012.

After 8 years of being locked away and forgotten, the new owner thought it was just a case of take it down to Moto Technique get it recommissioned and MOT’d and “Bob’s Your Uncle” as they like to say in good old Blighty.

Unfortunately, as the car was inspected and carefully evaluated, it was soon discovered that this once magnificent machine was going to need a little more work than was originally envisaged… in fact a lot more work!!!

It was at this stage that the new owner then took the brave, but bold decision to give this once great racing Ferrari the “Full” ground up, nuts and bolts restoration that it truly deserved.

It would be restored to its former glory, but due to some technical advances which had been made in the years since it first raced, it would also benefit from a few minor modern tweaks.

Moto Technique with their vast skill and experience were chosen to carry out this mammoth task.

And so began what soon became the most detailed and epic restoration project to date for the Moto Technique team. It would take the skill and experience of every in-house department to achieve this goal, something that they did very convincingly with their professionalism and pride.

One of the biggest challenges of restoring this former race car was to get as much accurate information as possible on this particular car (Chassis #84326).

This proved to be quite a task as not all the F40LM/GTE’s raced in the same series and not all of them participated in every races. Most importantly of all, not all the cars applied all the factory updates and being run by different race teams they all had different approaches and philosophies as to how best prepare their cars to go racing.

Hence no two F40LM / GTE’s are the same!!