You can almost taste the champagne with these Ford GT40 replicas

By Lizzie Pope

| 6 Aug 2019

Classic & Sports Car – You can almost taste the champagne with these Ford GT40 replicas

Accept it: you’re never going to own a double Le Mans-winning Ford GT40 supercar.

For starters, there’s only one of them in existence, P/1075, and it’s not likely to come up for sale any time soon. And even if it did, the price would be astronomical: a Le Mans GT40 sold for nearly $10m last year, and that one only finished third.

So no, you’re never going to own a double Le Mans-winning GT40. But what you could own is this painstakingly accurate replica.

It ticks all the boxes with its now-iconic Gulf livery and famous shape, and although it didn’t take the chequered flag at Le Sarthe in 1968 and ’69, it does wear the number six just as P/1075 did in the second of those two years.

And the best bit of all? It will cost about a tenth of what the real thing would.

This limited-edition replica is the result of a collaboration between Superformance, Safir GT40 and Gulf, and is available from Le Mans Coupes Ltd.

A total of 50 will be built, in two varieties: Tribute edition and Toolroom copy. The former, which will cost from £185,000, will be “outwardly indistinguishable” from P/1075 – think wide body and wheels plus that iconic Gulf livery.

It will be a slightly different matter under the bonnet, though, with a choice of Roush-built Ford V8 engines with either 5- or 7-litre capacity, and there’s also the option of a Quaife RFQ or ZF RBT transaxle. These Tribute editions are fully road-legal – which makes them a lot more usable than the real thing – and even come with air-conditioning.

The Toolroom versions, meanwhile, will replicate P/1075 both aesthetically and mechanically, and can be specced for track-day use or to attain HTP FIA-approval, meaning they’d be eligible for historic racing – but for this you’d need to shell out £280,000 including VAT.

In addition, HTP FIA-eligible toolroom copies of pre-’66 Mk1 GT40 racers are available from £250,000.

As Le Mans Coupes Ltd’s Managing Director Oliver Hulme says, “Only one person can own the original and that’s unlikely to come to market anytime soon, and will be way beyond the pocket of 99.9% of enthusiasts if and when it does.”

Not that these cars are mere pocket money, but we take his point.

If it sweetens the deal, all Tribute edition and Toolroom copy cars will be sold with a GT40 P/1000 Series chassis number, a plaque listing 25 of the employees that were key to P/1075’s success and, perhaps most bizarrely, a limited-edition Gulf GT40 guitar, maybe to help buyers complete that rock’n’roll, racing driver image.

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