It wasn’t a winning car, but if you ask a long-time Ferrari driver which Rossa was the most beautiful, many will answer the Ferrari 643the model used in the 1991 season. This real piece of history was put up for sale in Paris, in the Salles du Carrousel of the Louvre, in an auction organized by RM Sotheby’s, for the “modest” sum of 3,661,250 euros , while the presale estimate fluctuated between 2.9 and 3.4 million euros.
This is an important price: certainly it is a Ferrari, but for example the Jordan 191 – the debut one of a certain Michael Schumacher – was sold for less than half (1.5 million euros) by Bonhams.
The Ferrari 643 is still in full working order: it has a 3.5-liter V12 engine that produces over 710 horsepower. The chassis is 127, brought to the track at Magny-Cours, Silverstone and Adelaide. It was driven in 1991 by Alain Prost, but the number 28 on the nose suggests that it was Jean’s car Alesi. The French driver’s best results that season with the 643 were third places at Hockenheim and Estoril. The history of that car is rather tormented from a sporting point of view: after coming close to the title in 1990 with Prost, everything seemed ready for a return to success 12 years after Jody Scheckter’s World Championship. However, the car suffered from outdated aerodynamics and in Maranello they decided to intervene during construction by making the 643 debut at Magny-Cours, a car with a deeply modified body, based on the raised nose and internal fluid dynamics, also in largely revised.
In fact, the 643 did not solve the problems that already afflicted the car from which it was derived: the complex chassis and suspension went into crisis on dips, especially when braking. Reliability remained a problem until the end of the season, and not even Prost managed to bring it to victory: on the contrary, the four-time world champion let off steam by calling the car a “truck” and thus earning himself an outright dismissal.
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