To get straight to the point - I was very impressed. It was at Birmingham’s NEC, on the last weekend in October, 2006, during the Classic Car Show. My first sight of a Superformance GT40 confirmed my suspicions that here really was a car worthy of the name GT40. Yes, it carries that name, and “officially”, too, but that wasn’t necessarily enough.
This isn’t the first latter-day GT40 to be built around a full steel monocoque, but it appears that already it’s the most successful. The first (officially, at least) was the MkV - a delightful, modernised, version of the GT40, and one for which I have a great deal of respect. Then came the various UK cars built around Tennant Panels tubs, and these really are so good that very few people can tell them from a 1960s original. Next up was Lee Holman’s Holman GT-40 MkII, another eye-wateringly good piece of work which absolutely oozes authenticity. Along the way there were the various Sbarro incarnations, some good, some not so good, and none with any form of official seal of approval, and over the years some enterprising individuals have built surprisingly accurate one-off monocoques. There are quite a few others which make use of simplified tubs, and of them the one I like the most is the ERA, which seems to me to be a good compromise between authenticity and cost.
So what does a GT40 need to make it real? Well, in my opinion, and it can only be that, an opinion, it needs a monocoque that’s pretty well indistinguishable from one made in the 1960s; and that, of course, means that any coupe version must have, amongst other things, a metal windscreen
surround and roof. Ideally the roof should be steel, although the fact that some of Alan Mann’s 1966 racers had alloy roofs would make me consider an alloy version to be acceptable. Is that enough? Again, in my opinion, it isn’t. It needs some form of pedigree, so that it can trace its lineage back to 1964.
The Superformance GT40 scores very heavily on both counts. Its monocoque (metal roof included) is stunningly good, and its pedigree benefits from having been sanctioned by Safir GT40 Spares Ltd, currently the holder of GT40 name and production rights. I won’t bore you with all the twists and turns of the saga of the name, but, briefly: the GT40 started as a Ford, and was then built by JW Automotive Engineering Ltd, with Ford’s permission and support. JW’s John Willment authorised Peter Thorp’s Safir Engineering to produce the licence-built GT40 Mark V, then Safir Engineering in turn passed the rights to Safir GT40 Spares Ltd, which despite its similar name is a quite different company, owned by John Sadler, Bob Wood and Brady Pack. At SAAC-30, in 2005, John Sadler told me that he was very impressed with the Superformance cars, and, provided that the necessary inspection showed that they were of sufficient quality, he would consider giving them Safir’s approval. He went, he saw, and he approved. And, at the NEC, I could see why. They are simply superb.
So, we now have another “official” GT40. It receives GT40P chassis numbers, beginning at 2000, but not issued consecutively. If a buyer has a particular favourite number, he can specify it, provided of course that it hasn’t already been issued - so that means you can forget such as 2075 and
