Ferrari F50: An F1 car for the road?

From the outset, appropriately, it was Piero Ferrari’s doing. Enzo’s second son believed any successor to the mighty F40 should be no less than an F1 car for the road. Piero’s idea, first conceived in 1989 – only two years after the launch of the F40 and the year following the death of his father – became the prime motivation for the F50.

As the engineers struggled to turn an open wheeler into a road machine, it was Piero’s persistence and determination as vice chairman of Ferrari (whose 10 per cent shareholding makes him worth £3.1 billion today) that carried his great ambition to fruition.

‘In the beginning,’ Piero explained to me in 1995, ‘it was our customers. They would come to Maranello and ask, “Why can’t Ferrari make something close to a Formula 1 car we can drive on the road?” I tried to give an answer. Maybe, I told them, 330km/h (205mph) is enough, but we could make something closer to the Formula 1 technology.