Ezra Dyer: Let Me Tell You About My (Friend’s) Ferrari F40
From the September/October 2026 issue of Car and Driver.During my sophomore year in college, in the mid-’90s, a buddy invited me to spend spring break at his aunt and uncle’s house in Florida. “My uncle’s a car...
From the September/October 2026 issue of Car and Driver.
During my sophomore year in college, in the mid-’90s, a buddy invited me to spend spring break at his aunt and uncle’s house in Florida. “My uncle’s a car guy,” he told me, but I was unprepared for what I saw when the garage doors rolled up: a Ferrari 512TR, a Bentley Turbo R, three Lamborghinis (Diablo, Countach, LM002), a BMW 850CSi, and a Porsche 911 Turbo 3.6. The biggest trophy, the one with its title framed on the wall, was a Ferrari F40, the first one imported to the United States. His uncle gave me a ride in it that I still remember in granular detail—the bumper-level view of a Dodge Caravan ahead of us in traffic, the way he casually took a left turn onto a highway on-ramp at 50 mph, the ensuing trip up through third gear and past 100 mph, turbos huffing behind our heads. Later that week, we went to Disney World, and Space Mountain had nothing on that F40 On-Ramp.
Unfortunately, the owner of all of these fine machines died about 10 years ago. His son, whom I’ll call Nate, became custodian of the collection. Nate isn’t his real name, but some Ferrari F40 owners don’t need to brag constantly about their F40 experiences. Hey, did I tell you about the time I rode in an F40?
Nate gradually sold most of his father’s cars, but he held on to the F40 and two Porsches—a 997-era 911 Turbo and a GT2. The Porsches he drives with minimal downtime, as one does with 911s. The Ferrari was a different story. An F40 is not a low-maintenance machine. In fact, it is all maintenance. The car spent months at one dealer, followed by months at another, as they tried to get the 478-hp 2.9-liter V-8 dialed in. Nate would see his car on the dealers’ social-media feeds while he waited and accrued random bills. “One dealer called me and said that he needed a particular laptop for diagnostics, and the only one they could find was in Japan with the display in Japanese,” Nate recalls. “He said they wouldn’t charge me for the laptop but would have to charge for translation.”
After about $50,000 in bills and more than a year without his car, Nate arrived at a tough conclusion: The F40 was not fun. “The best thing about owning an F40 is telling your friends you have an F40,” he says. “I started to ask myself, ‘What kind of car guy do I want to be? A guy with a hangar full of cars that don’t get driven?’” Nate’s inclinations run more toward driving the 911 Turbo to track days at Virginia International Raceway, which is notable since he lives in New York—an 18-hour round trip away.
Habits like that expose a conundrum with an F40, even one in finest fettle. “It’s not 10 times more fun to drive than a $200,000 car,” Nate says. “My dad tracked it, but I’d never do that because I couldn’t live with myself if I damaged it.” Eventually, Nate acknowledged a reality all of us confront at some point: the dawning awareness that a car you’re sentimentally attached to just doesn’t fit with your life. Except his situation was a little different from most, because F40s are worth seven figures, so he wasn’t going to create a Facebook Marketplace listing and invite the general public over for test drives. He also didn’t want to risk an auction, online or live. Ultimately, Nate pioneered a new F40 financial instrument: He walked into an Ineos dealer and told them he wanted a Grenadier, but he had a trade-in. He took home a new SUV and a check for $2.4 million. Remember that the next time a car salesman says, “I have to talk to my manager,” and disappears for an hour to ascertain whether you’re eligible for the $500 regional bonus cash.
If Nate wasn’t exactly Cameron at the end of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, kicking his dad’s prized Ferrari out into the woods, he did achieve a similar emotional denouement by letting go of the F40. “I have great memories of my dad and that car, but I’ll have those whether I own it or not,” he says. “And now I’m having my own experiences with my kids. We were off-roading with the Grenadier at our farm and got stuck, and they thought that was the best.” His daughter, 13, is the oldest and gets to drive the Grenadier off-road. Can’t do that with an F40.
However, even someone as healthily pragmatic as Nate isn’t immune to regrets. He laments that there was one car in that garage he should have kept—one that my 19-year-old self also drooled over but didn’t fully appreciate as a consequence of its proximity to the white-hot star power of the F40. “The 512TR was drivable and livable, it sounded great, and it was pretty straightforward to fix,” he says. “Maybe I’ll buy it back someday.”
Ezra Dyer is a Car and Driver senior editor and columnist. He's now based in North Carolina but still remembers how to turn right. He owns a 2009 GEM e4 and once drove 206 mph. Those facts are mutually exclusive.