Hassanal Bolkiah may not ring a bell to you, but the Sultan of Brunei certainly does. The absolute monarch is notorious in the automotive world for his 7,000-plus car collection that includes one-offs like the F40 Coda Lunga we’ll be talking on this occasion.
Those two words stand for Long Tail, and no, it’s no coincidence that McLaren has a slew of longtails of its own. On the other hand, the Prancing Horse has a longer history with the low-drag design if we take the 512 S Coda Lunga into consideration.
The old-school racer didn’t lack grace or beauty yet Ferrari had a hard time keeping up with the Porsche 917 at Le Mans. Turning our attention back to the F40 in Coda Lunga flavor, the one-of-none supercar was supposedly bodied in this fashion “to beat the McLaren F1 and reach 400 km/h” on a long enough runway.
That’s 248.5 miles per hour if you were wondering, a lot more than the 200-ish miles per hour (322 kph) of the bone-stock car. The XP5 prototype of the McLaren F1 was pushed to a peak speed of 243 mph (391 kph) by British racing driver Andy Wallace. Unfortunately, nobody knows if the F40 Coda Lunga could do it.
French photographer and pixel artist Jpog has recently published three pics of the rarefied stallion on his Behance page, claiming that these images date from 1994. Pictured in one of the sultan’s aeronautical hangars, the Coda Lunga enters the scene once again in the form of a futuristic rendering and a bit of a backstory.
“The car sold to a new owner in the Middle East,” tells Jpog, “now sporting modern accessories in a restomod fashion.” Digitally retouching the car also translates to improved aerodynamics, and this way, the mid-engine unicorn has finally reached 400 km/h a quarter of a century after the Coda Lunga was immortalized on film.
With our feet back on the ground, it must be mentioned that Ferrari did its best to make the F40 a McLaren F1-slaying machine with two variations of the breed. LM and Competizione is how they’re called, and the two race-ready models can hit 229 mph (368 kph). The top speed test took place at Nardo in February '89.
The old-school racer didn’t lack grace or beauty yet Ferrari had a hard time keeping up with the Porsche 917 at Le Mans. Turning our attention back to the F40 in Coda Lunga flavor, the one-of-none supercar was supposedly bodied in this fashion “to beat the McLaren F1 and reach 400 km/h” on a long enough runway.
That’s 248.5 miles per hour if you were wondering, a lot more than the 200-ish miles per hour (322 kph) of the bone-stock car. The XP5 prototype of the McLaren F1 was pushed to a peak speed of 243 mph (391 kph) by British racing driver Andy Wallace. Unfortunately, nobody knows if the F40 Coda Lunga could do it.
French photographer and pixel artist Jpog has recently published three pics of the rarefied stallion on his Behance page, claiming that these images date from 1994. Pictured in one of the sultan’s aeronautical hangars, the Coda Lunga enters the scene once again in the form of a futuristic rendering and a bit of a backstory.
“The car sold to a new owner in the Middle East,” tells Jpog, “now sporting modern accessories in a restomod fashion.” Digitally retouching the car also translates to improved aerodynamics, and this way, the mid-engine unicorn has finally reached 400 km/h a quarter of a century after the Coda Lunga was immortalized on film.
With our feet back on the ground, it must be mentioned that Ferrari did its best to make the F40 a McLaren F1-slaying machine with two variations of the breed. LM and Competizione is how they’re called, and the two race-ready models can hit 229 mph (368 kph). The top speed test took place at Nardo in February '89.