There’s a particular kind of excitement that grips car people when they spot a familiar shape buried in a Google Maps image. A particular silhouette in a half-collapsed barn, an unmistakable tail light, or a shade of color that couldn’t be anything else, and suddenly you’re convinced you’ve stumbled onto buried treasure, or at least that’s the closest equivalent for gearheads. That’s the rabbit hole Spanish YouTuber Georgesmithgood fell into after followers sent him satellite coordinates claiming to show not one but two Ferrari F40s left to rot in the Spanish and Portuguese countryside.
For context, this isn’t some random old barn find that got this YouTuber excited. The tips that he was sent clearly pointed to the automotive holy grail: the F40. It was Enzo Ferrari’s final approval before his death, built to mark the brand’s 40th anniversary, and it remains the last Ferrari he personally signed off on. Around 1,311 were made between 1987 and 1992, with its exotic tag coming from Kevlar and carbon fiber body panels and a twin-turbo V8 that also gave the F40 its widow maker reputation. Today, values of the Ferrari F40 can stretch from $2 million to well past $3 million, depending on its condition, miles, provenance and more. If you actually found one on a whim just abandoned in a shed, you wouldn’t be excited, you’d be planning your retirement.
Obviously the YouTuber Georgesmithgood had to follow up on the tips, driving hundreds of miles to chase down two separate locations. The first stop was to check out a satellite image of a yellow car in a breaker yard, a car vaguely-F40 shaped. Up close, though, the illusion fell apart fast. It was a kit car built on a Pontiac Fiero chassis, a donor car commonly used for supercar replicas. This particular effort wasn’t even a half-convincing kit car, let alone coming close to a convincing Ferrari.
The second car, further along his road trip, turned out to be built on the same Fiero underpinnings, but executed with noticeably more care. Good enough, in fact, that the owner offered to sell it to him on the spot for $35,000. The YouTuber passed on the offer, understandably. A well-built Ferrari replica is still a fun thing to own, but it’s not quite the same story you’d tell at a car meet as “I found a real F40 abandoned in a barn.”
Sometimes the internet’s tips lead you somewhere real. In this instance, they just led to a very long drive, some invaluable content for social media, and a lesson in managing expectations.
