This Ferrari F40 just sold for £791,000 at auction

This is a Ferrari F40. It is red. It has had one owner from new. It is in mint condition. So, as you might imagine, it isn’t cheap.

In fact, this very Ferrari F40 has just sold for €1.12m at auction.

Which means that – at £791k in proper English money – this example has achieved one of the highest prices ever paid at auction for an F40. Though not the highest: earlier this year, another single-owner Ferrari F40 sold at RM Sotheby’s Paris sale for €1.17m.

Auction house Coys hosted the sale, which took place over the weekend at the 43rd AVD Oldtimer Grand Prix at the ‘Ring. Which is in Germany.

“This is one of the last privately owned, one-owner-from new F40s in the world,” explains Coys’ Chris Routledge. “We were entrusted with its sale by the Italian family who bought it.”

The rare F40 now moves to new ownership in the hands of a very lucky German, who Top Gear can only hope will take advantage of the carbon fibre supercar’s twin-turbo 2.9-litre V8 and many, many shouty Italian horsepowers. 478 shouty Italian horsepowers, to be precise.

£791,000 is clearly a lot of money for an old(ish) car, even an old(ish) car as legendary as the F40. But it’s not quite such silly money as you might think.

See, at launch in 1987, the F40 cost around £163,000. Accounting for inflation, that’s equivalent to around £430,000 in today’s money, which means that the venerable F40 has increased in value by a mere 80-odd per cent in its 20-something-year life.

Which makes the F40 a veritable money-pit when you consider the LaFerrari that came up for sale last month had apparently more than doubled in value in less than a year.

Conclusion: F40s are bargains and we must all buy one immediately.