Just_a_fan wrote: β19 May 2023, 11:49
I guess it comes down to the definition of "hypercar". The F40 wasn't that much quicker than the 959 even though it was stripped out like a race car and weighed c.200kg less. They managed that weight reduction by making it laughably basic. The F1 was lighter than both and had creature comforts and could be used as a day-to-day road car just like the 959 but had performance that neither could live with.
In race car trim, the F40 benefited from being a turbo-charged engine. Dead easy to add some boost to get more power. The F1 in racing trim had less power than the road car so an F40 being quicker with 700bhp+ over c.600bhp is hardly a surprise. What was impressive was that the F1 won Le Mans with very little work done to make it comply with the rules.
The F40 was a effectively a race car for the road. The 959 was a road car version of what would have been a Group B rally car had Group B not been cancelled. The F1 was a road car pure and simple. That the F1 was miles ahead of either of the other two speaks volumes about it.
Adding caveats to qualify the F1...They're arbitrary.
Race car for road, Group B rally car, Basic, Turbo, Stripped out etc etc are not disqualifiers in road legal production Hypercars.
We can discount the 300SLR as that was based on a race car. AC cobra too.
And the Veyron as it used Turbos. Koenigsegg too.
Ferrari using turbos on their own engine no bueno you say. How do you reconcile that with McLaren not even building the F1's engine?
I would also be reticent to qualify the F1 as "miles ahead" given it won Le Mans, it had 5 years on the F40, with the F40 still racing 9 years after it's inception. The McLaren was only raced for 3 years(4 if you include privateers), and could not be modified to compete in any evolved racing series.
We could just as easily say the Porsche GT1 was the greatest....which used a 962 rear end from 1988, and a 993 front end from 1990, beat the McLaren handily with a similar head start.
Also, creature comforts and being used as a daily are totally not what the hypercar category is about.
Disqualifying the F40 for being poor at both, you lose what Chris Harris describes as the "greatest roadcar" of all time.
Note, I'm not downplaying the F1 as it's a masterpiece of engineering. I just don't think it's right to disqualify the F40 on parameters that literally have no deference for what it means to be a hypercar.