The Ferrari F50 deserves more respect | Thank Frankel it’s Friday

So it’s good to see that the market now reflects not just the excellence of Ferrari’s third hypercar – after the F40 and ‘288’ GTO, but its scarcity too. While Ferrari made 1,315 F40s, F50 production at 349 units make them barely more than a quarter as plentiful.

It is of course true that Ferrari got a lot of things wrong with the F50, the styling being merely the most obvious. It also had critically flawed packaging. I well remember a Ferrari chaperon making ever more elaborate excuses for why he was not going to fit its hard top when I knew the real reason was he didn’t want me to see how ludicrously little room there was inside with it in place. I found out later I’d almost certainly have been unable to drive the car. So we left it off and when it rained, we got wet. The F50 made no provision for taking it with you.

Yet it was a car that I felt and still feel fantastically well disposed towards, and if this sounds in any way surprising, you need reminding of a few credentials. It was only the second car ever, after the McLaren F1, to boast a carbon-fibre tub (third if you count the road-going versions of the Jaguar XJR-15) to which was rigidly mounted a bespoke 4.7-litre, V12, 60-valve engine, something not even McLaren dared do. Whether that engine was actually related to that used by the 1990 Ferrari 641 as claimed, is a subject I could spend the rest of this column debating. But it does seem the start point for the motor was indeed the Formula 1 3.5-litre V12 which developed 689PS (507kW) at 12,750rpm, though it is likely that nothing remained of it once expanded to 4.7-litres and detuned sufficiently to produce 519PS (382kW) at 8,000rpm.

But what I liked most about the F50 relative to those other low-volume, high-output supercars of the era, was that it was so confidence-inspiring to drive. The F50 had none of the intimidation of an XJ220 or the wet-road trickiness of the McLaren; there wasn’t even much of a learning curve – you just got in, felt immediately at home and happy to drive hard from the first kilometre.

Some have interpreted this as a fault, believing that no car that easy could ultimately be that rewarding to drive. Wrong again. Spend a day in an F50, hearing that V12 at 8,500rpm, poking the tail wide at every tight turn and tell me that’s not rewarding. In fact, looks and packaging aside, it has just one problem: it came out after the F40.

The curse of the F50 is for its one-line write-up in history to read ‘not as good as the F40’. Yet the F50 has a normally aspirated V12 rather than a turbo V8, it was more powerful than the F40, had a monocoque constructed from rather than merely clad in carbon-fibre and it was quicker too. Not in a straight-line perhaps, but around a track unquestionably so. The F50 was no apology for anything. Had the F40 never been built, I think it likely it would be remembered as one of the greatest Ferrari road cars of all.

So respect is due to the F50. No, it’s not as ultimately thrilling or involving as an F40 but that does not make it less than an incredible machine. Ugly, flawed and ignored though it became, so too for a long time was the F50 also the most underrated Ferrari of all. I’m glad it appears at last to have been restored to its proper place in the pantheon of all-time great Ferrari road cars. Which is definitely somewhere inside the top ten. But above the F40? Well, the F50 is good. Really good. But that good? Probably not.