The £80,000 GT40 That Isn’t a GT40

When does a replica stop being a cheap copy and become a valuable car in its own right?

There is something slightly absurd about a car advertised on Facebook Marketplace as a 2017 Ford GT40 for £79,995. Ford stopped building the GT40 in 1969. Yet the price is not absurd at all.

The car that caught my eye was advertised near Chippenham. The description was magnificent in its brevity: “GT40 Ford 302 4 barrel Holley Audi gearbox.” That was about it. Which is probably sufficient information if you’re selling a carburettor. For an £80,000 hand-built car, I might have been tempted to add a little more.

It is, of course, a replica. Or recreation, continuation, tribute, evocation or whichever word causes the least distress at the owners’ club. But that doesn’t mean it is a cheap imitation. Quite the opposite. Good GT40 replicas have become seriously valuable cars in their own right.

Coincidentally, I watched Le Mans ’66 the other day, for the second time. It tells the story of Carroll Shelby, Ken Miles and Ford’s increasingly obsessive determination to beat Ferrari at Le Mans. Like most films based on real events, it plays fairly fast and loose with some of the detail, but it does remind you just what made the GT40 famous.

Ford didn’t simply build something beautiful and enormously powerful. It went to Le Mans specifically intending to beat Ferrari, initially failed rather expensively, and then came back and did it. The result was the famous Ford 1-2-3 finish in 1966, followed by outright GT40 victories in 1967, 1968 and 1969. That competition history is what turned the GT40 into an icon.

And, having watched the film again, perhaps it explains why I stopped scrolling when a GT40 suddenly appeared on Facebook Marketplace for £79,995. Except, of course, it wasn’t a GT40. At least, not one built by Ford in the 1960s.

Original GT40s now inhabit a financial world inaccessible to most normal human beings. Recent sales have run into many millions of pounds, with particularly important examples reaching eight-figure sums. Which creates an interesting problem. Suppose you don’t merely want to own a GT40. You actually want to drive one.

You could spend several million pounds on an original and then take it down the A46 in the rain, surrounded by people in Nissan Qashqais who are simultaneously eating a sandwich and looking at their phones. Or you could buy a replica.

This is where the word “replica” becomes slightly misleading. We tend to think of a replica as a cheaper copy of something valuable. But a properly built GT40 recreation is also a hand-built, low-volume performance car in its own right. Its value therefore isn’t simply determined by how accurately it imitates a Ford built sixty years ago. It is determined by what went into building it.

There are kit cars which are essentially bits of assorted donor vehicle wearing something vaguely resembling the intended body. Then there are cars constructed around purpose-designed chassis, with properly engineered suspension, large Ford V8s, appropriate transaxles and remarkably accurate bodies. They aren’t pretending to have GT40 chassis numbers and nobody sensible regards them as genuine 1960s Fords. They are modern recreations of the driving experience.

And people will now pay substantial amounts for the good ones. Market figures for GT40 replicas put decent examples well into five figures, while cars from respected manufacturers such as Tornado and Southern GT can reach £70,000, £80,000 and beyond. There is no sensible blanket price for a “GT40 replica”, however. Manufacturer, chassis, build quality, engine, transmission, registration history and provenance matter enormously. An anonymous home-built car of uncertain origins is a very different proposition from a properly documented car from an established specialist.

Which brings us back to our £79,995 Facebook car and its heroic eight-word description. At that price I would rather like to know who manufactured the chassis, who built the car, when it passed IVA, exactly which Ford 302 is sitting behind my head, what suspension and brakes it has, and precisely which Audi transaxle is attempting to cope with the V8 attached to it.

The Audi gearbox is interesting in itself. It isn’t authentic, but that’s rather the point. Audi transaxles have provided GT40 builders with a practical engineering solution to the problem of putting a suitable gearbox behind a substantial Ford V8 in a mid-engined car. This isn’t necessarily about reproducing every component Ford fitted in 1966. It is about recreating the experience in a car that can actually be used.

And building one properly isn’t cheap. A good GT40 recreation isn’t simply a fibreglass shell dropped over a Ford Sierra. The chassis has to work, the suspension geometry matters, cooling a large V8 in a forty-inch-high mid-engined car isn’t trivial, and neither is making the brakes, steering and transmission behave properly.

Then there is the bodywork, glazing, interior, instruments, wiring, wheels, paint and hundreds of small pieces required to turn a collection of components into something convincingly resembling one of the most famous racing cars ever built. And somebody has to put the bloody thing together. A professionally built GT40 replica can contain many hundreds of hours of skilled labour. Once you start pricing fabrication, engineering, bodywork and paint at commercial rates, £70,000 or £80,000 becomes considerably less mysterious.

There is another factor which I suspect matters even more. An £80,000 replica can actually be used.

If you owned a £5 million original GT40, every supermarket trolley would become an existential threat. Stone chips would acquire financial significance. Leaving it unattended outside a pub would require either immense courage or substantial medication.

A replica turns the equation around. You can drive it to Le Mans. You can get caught in the rain. You can take your grandson out in it. You can open the throttle occasionally without wondering whether a mechanical failure has just wiped the value of a small house off the family balance sheet. And because the car underneath can use more modern and readily available components, it may actually be easier to maintain than the original.

This is perhaps why replicas of cars such as the GT40 and AC Cobra have developed markets of their own. They are no longer necessarily the consolation prize for somebody who cannot afford the real thing. The best examples are desirable cars in their own right.

There is also something rather appealing about the honesty of it. Provided nobody tries to pass one off as an original, I have no problem with replicas whatsoever. Indeed, I rather like them. The important thing isn’t whether the chassis left a factory in Slough in 1966. It is whether the engineering is good, whether it captures the character of the original and whether somebody actually drives the thing.

That, after all, was what GT40s were built for. They weren’t designed to sit beneath dust sheets appreciating in value.

They were designed to make a bloody enormous noise and go very quickly.

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