Are You Cool With This Ferrari F40, Foxbody Ford Mustang Mashup?
Yeah, that’s a mid-mounted, twin-turbo Voodoo V8 all right.
Mashups of 1980s American pony cars and Ferraris are rarely beauties to behold. Yet to every rule, there is an exception, and this rule's exception is a particularly unusual blend of Ford and Ferrari that, against all odds, works in this author's eyes. It's called the F40xbody, and we dare you to figure out how to say that name aloud.
This car is the brainchild of Ron Baugh, who began to wonder in the wake of the Ford Mustang Shelby GT350's announcement in 2015 what the best possible use of its 5.2-liter, flat-plane-crank "Voodoo" V8 could be. Baugh's mind wandered directly to a mid-engined "Foxbody" Mustang with a louvered, F40-style Lexan engine hatch and a pair of turbochargers (as we all do), but the idea didn't progress much further until last December when Baugh shared his vision with render-meister Abimelec Arellano.
Arellano set to work mocking up a fusion of the F40 and a 1993 Mustang Cobra, heavily modifying each car's lines to work with one another.
"I did most of the design with input of Ron in some aspects; I started to work with a '93 Cobra, chopped the roof and lowered the front hood line, also cut out the fenders to have wider openings," Arellano told The Drive. "That ended up looking terrible so I scratched it and started over again. The second time, the roof chop was just as substantial, however, done in a different way to preserve the original lines of the car. Midway through this process, Ron told me about the Saleen RRR and asked if we could implement the Ford Thunderbird headlights, just like the Saleen, in order to lower the front profile, which was a must to achieve the kind of 'sunk-in' look of the F40."
Abimelec also tacked F40-style fenders onto the Mustang and completed the cheeky nod to his Ferrari muse with modified Ferrari crests, featuring not the prancing horse, but a sprinting pony. The end result is a car as unusual as they come, but also one whose looks somehow come together—they're halfway between that of a stock car and something you'd expect to dominate IMSA.
I have but one criticism of the F40xbody: It doesn't actually exist, and that's a crime. What you see here are only renders, and until someone as wealthy and enterprising as James Glickenhaus bankrolls this car's development, a render it'll stay.
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