My F40 rebuild

I was told by my office manager that Ed Zabinski was on the phone and wanted to speak to me and that it was important. Ed had a race shop next door to my Ferrari repair shop in Jupiter Florida. He was in Washington state at an insurance auction trying to buy Ford Mustangs which he would convert to race cars.
When I answered the call he told me that there was a Ferrari coming up for auction was I interested? I said of course and asked him to furnish more details. He called back later and said that it was an F40 and that it was involved in a fire. According to what he was told the car spun while on a race track and backed into a guard rail. The right rear suspension was pushed forward and punctured the right side fuel tank igniting a fire.
Ed said the car was rebuildable and that he could get the car to LA , for a fee, and that I could arrange to have it shipped from there. I agreed and we purchased the car. I overnighted a cashier’s check to him and received the paperwork from the auction company which included a salvage title.
Ed got the car to LA but it took me several months to find someone to bring it the rest of the way to Florida. I still had not seen the car and transport companies would refuse to accept the car once their driver’s inspected it.
Eventually a brave trucker took on the task and it arrived at my shop. The woman I was married to at the time had a fit when she saw it sitting in the shop. My friends and employees all had a good laugh and I was the butt of many jokes for months.
The work soon began and an employee named Vincent Colombo took on the task of stripping the car down to the bare chassis. Anything salvageable was saved everything else went into the trash. The chassis then went to a local sandblaster and was stripped and primed to prevent further rust. From there it went to a fellow named Jake, I can not recall his last name, that drove a sand and gravel truck during the day but had a small frame shop behind his house in West Palm Beach.
Using oval tubing I got from the late Jerry Curtis and metric tubing purchased from Maryland metrics Jake carefully rebuilt the frame. I had a frame blueprint with all important dimensions. Meanwhile Dean Romer, the parts manager at Wide World of Cars dug around his storage container and found me an OEM street car roof and upper dash, I purchased them both. The search for additional parts was on going but performed at a pace that I could afford financially.
With the car back in my shop it was placed on jack stands and the roof and dash pieces were laid in place mainly to quash the comments my friends were still making. With a little imagination the car was taking shape.

 

I soon met an Englishman that was involved with the IMSA GTP Nissan team, John Christie, or some thing like that. He told me that his team raced an F40LM at one point and had spare body panels for the car. We began negotiations for the parts and eventually the nose arrived.
Unfortunately the piece was fiberglass and a chopper gun was used to “lay up” the glass and the piece weighed a ton! As it turned all of the other parts were made using the same method. My composite guy came down to see me and we decided to use the English pieces as plugs to make molds and that he would “hand lay” the parts using Carbon fiber.
A different vendor, with a shop near the airport, began making interior panels using aluminum sheet metal patterns we had made for that purpose.
I had decided from the beginning that the car was to be a track car and never driven on the street. Owing to the severity of the accident the car had been through it was my opinion that the car was not suitable to be driven the road and to do so would be inviting some sort of negligence lawsuit. The car would be a race car!
It was about this time that my step daughter came to me and told me that she had been accepted my several major Universities. We were all thrilled of course but when the excitement dyed down it was clear that I needed to devise a plan to pay for her education.
I had always told her if she got the grades and was accepted to college it was my job to pay for it so the heat was on.
The decision to sell the F40 project was a painful one but worthwhile considering how the funds from the sale would be spent. I still feel I made the correct decision. So an ad was placed in the Ferrari Market Letter and a monsoon of responses soon followed.
One of the caveats for the sale was that I wanted to finish the project for the new owner.

Photos and additional text to follow

 

I did not want to continue this story without photos so we got the old scanner out and working and here are a few of the chassis after it's return from the frame shop.
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