Alain Prost’s Ferrari F40 is up for private auction

As company welcome gifts go, a brand-new Ferrari F40 certainly beats a lunchtime trip to a local sandwich shop. Fresh from winning his third F1 world championship with McLaren in 1989, Alain Prost moved to Ferrari’s F1 team where he immediately received this rosso haymaker.

So while his Ferrari candle may have burned quickly and ended acrimoniously, it began with one of the most celebrated Ferraris of all time.

And do you know how besotted The Professor was with his new acquisition? “Mr Prost confirmed that he took delivery of the Ferrari but never used it, selling it very shortly after,” explains RM Sotheby’s. So while it was indeed registered at his home in France… he never drove it.

Whatever compelled Mr Prost to refrain from driving a twin-turbocharged Ferrari hypercar remains unknown. We do know the F40 – complete with its 478bhp 2.9-litre twin-turbo V8 – was then sold to a Mr Graham de Zille, a Ferrari collector and Challenge Series racing driver. Before he got the car, Prost signed the roof and covered it in a clear coat. It’s still visible today.

After de Zille’s time with the F40, it went through a number of UK-based owners before a brief return to Maranello in 2016 to celebrate the marque’s 70th anniversary, where it finished second in a Fiorano concours. It then went back to France, where it currently lives.

The car has covered less than 6,000km since it was registered new in Prost’s name in 1990, and is of the apparently “highly desirable non-cat, non-adjust specification” (no catalytic convertor, non-adjustable suspension). It also carries with it a tonne of history and of course, performance.

RM Sotheby’s reckons on anywhere between €2.5m to €3m – so up to £2.6m – but of course it could go higher. Higher still, one suspects, had Prost actually driven the rosso haymaker.