A Barely Used Ferrari F40 Engine Is Up For Auction

What you’re looking at here is so rare, the term ‘rocking horse poo’ doesn’t adequately cover it. This is a Ferrari F40 V8 being sold on its own, and not only that, it’s barely used.

Before you panic and start imagining some sort of tragedy that befell one of the 1315 F40s produced during the seminal supercar’s five-year production run, we should point out this 2.9-litre twin-turbo lump was never assigned to a chassis. It was a spare, which was initially sent to Japan for Team Taisan to test in a competition F40.

The engine covered less than 1000 kilometres during this testing phase. After this point, the car it powered was converted to GTE regulations for entry into the All Japan Grand Touring Car Championship - a forerunner to Super GT. This meant switching to a different powerplant, leaving this ‘Tipo F120A’ surplus to requirements.

It’s described as being in “good order,” with all the ancillary parts - save for a slightly damaged oil filter casing - said to be in good condition. The 471bhp engine hasn’t been used in about 25 years, however, so it’ll need a decent amount of service work before being deployed. And this being a rare Ferrari engine, that isn’t going to be cheap.

It’s hard to predict how much it’ll go for, considering how infrequently anything like this comes to market. To give some idea, a largely disassembled F40 engine was sold in the USA via Bring a Trailer for $88,040 (£71,300) a couple of years ago. This one, meanwhile, is being auctioned via Collecting Cars, and the bidding is at £22,500 with five days to go at the time of writing.

It’ll most likely end up in a surviving F40, or it could - distressingly - be bought as a display piece. Being the weirdos we are, however, we can’t help but imagine some more leftfield destinations. What would you want to install it in?