An F40 in the Rain — London Concours 2026

I went up to London Concours on the Wednesday. It rained. Not the dramatic kind — the steady, grey, very British kind that has everyone huddled under the hospitality awnings pretending they planned it that way.

The Honourable Artillery Company is a strange and brilliant place to put a hundred significant cars. Five acres of lawn in the middle of the Square Mile, office blocks rising on every side. Wednesday was officially Jaguar XK day, and the XK lineage was beautifully represented. But I'll be honest about where I spent most of my time.

There was a Ferrari F40 on the lawn in factory finish. No aftermarket anything, no concessions, no patina dressed up as character. It looked new. Genuinely new — as if it had rolled out of Maranello that morning and someone had simply parked it on the grass.

I've photographed cars professionally for seventeen years, and I've seen plenty of F40s. Most of them carry their history visibly: stone chips, crazed lacquer, the slightly tired look of a car that's been driven the way Ferrari intended. There's nothing wrong with that. But seeing one in this condition, in the rain, with water beading on that famous Rosso Corsa paint, was something else entirely. The F40 was never meant to look precious. It was a raw, lightweight, almost unfinished car. Seeing one preserved this perfectly is like finding a forty-year-old race suit still in its packaging.

A couple of honourable mentions before I sign off. A yellow Lamborghini Countach — a car that looks like it was designed with a ruler and a grudge, and somehow even more outrageous in the flesh than in any poster. And at the other end of the timeline, a £3M Koenigsegg Jesko, which drew a constant crowd all day. Forty-odd years separate those two cars, and you could draw a straight line from one to the other: the same refusal to be sensible.

The rest of the day was a blur of good cars and damp shoes. But it's the F40 I drove home thinking about.