1955 Ferrari 121 LM Spider

This car, Lot 123, sold for $6,190,415 (€5,742,500), including buyer’s premium, at the RM Sotheby’s Le Mans sale on June 9, 2023.

I have long held a fascination for racing cars that I like to refer to as “fabulous failures,” cars that embodied the hopes and dreams of their builders but for various reasons fell flat in the crucible of serious racing. Lessons can be learned, and progress achieved, in defeat as well as success. Not every experiment works, and in the rapidly evolving environment of international racing in the mid-1950s, this Ferrari was the poster child.

Don’t get me wrong, the Ferrari 121 LM (also called 735 S in the traditional nomenclature) is gorgeous, stupidly fast, technically interesting and historically important. It was not without success (later, in U.S. club racing). It is unquestionably a highly collectible Ferrari.

However, these cars were also notorious for being difficult to drive, with brutal throttle response in an overpowered chassis that was never fully developed. Ferrari gave up on it after only two races (the Mille Miglia and Le Mans), finishing its 1955 season racing the 750 Monza. Many consider the 121 LM to be the worst sports-racing Ferrari ever built. How much this matters 70 years later in the collector world is an interesting question, but let’s talk about the car first.

Ferrari as David

Ferrari in the Enzo days was the ultimate David fighting against Goliaths on the track. For the 1955 season it competed against Mercedes’ mind-bogglingly-sophisticated 300SLR and Jaguar’s aerodynamic wonder, the monocoque-chassis D-type. With no corporate parent to absorb development costs and at most a few hundred cars being sold to generate cash, Ferrari was stuck with what it had, which at the time was the 750 Monza. Its competition success had long been defined by a simple formula — having more horsepower than anyone else — so it continued with that approach.

Ferrari is justly iconic for its V12 racing engines — some people think that is all it ever built. But in the mid-1950s, the V12 had been largely abandoned in favor of the simpler, lighter and torquier 4-cylinder engines, the 2- and 2.5-liter Mondial and 3-liter Monza. The logical and cheapest approach to adding horsepower appeared to be simply taking a known good engine and adding cylinders. Lampredi started by stretching the 2.5-liter to a 6-cylinder, called the Type 118, then the 3-liter Monza to make the Type 121. This dropped the displacement per cylinder a bit, from 750 cc to 735 cc, making a 4.4-liter 6 that generated 360 hp. Three more-or-less-standard Monza chassis got the Type 118 engine, then were upgraded to the Type 121 after the Mille Miglia. A fourth was built as a 121 in time for Le Mans.

A flawed design

At Le Mans, the 121s were clearly the fastest cars entered. Umberto Maglioli set the fastest lap in practice and was timed at 181 mph on the Mulsanne Straight, but the car had serious problems, most of which were endemic to its design. The first was weight distribution. If you build an engine half-again larger, then put it in the same chassis, way too much weight ends up on the front wheels, which kills handling. Second, there is a limit to how much horsepower you can put through a chassis with six-inch-wide tires. Competitors mentioned watching the 121s literally shredding their tires exiting corners.

The worst problem was reliability. A straight-6 engine creates torsional vibrations through the crankshaft — it’s physics. Any inline 6-cylinder racing engine over about 2.5 liters needs to have a vibration dampener fitted or it will shake the flywheel off. Lampredi’s 4-cylinder engine design had a completely closed front, so there was no place to fit one. So Ferrari decided to chance not using one, and it didn’t work. The last 121 failed at 10 hours (of 24) and Ferrari gave up on the 6-cylinder, selling all four cars to the U.S. in hopes that they would do better in shorter races.

The cars did have somewhat better results in the U.S., with Carroll Shelby and Ernie McAfee notching some wins. But nobody liked the cars, and they were quickly put away as the world moved on. In the end it was a brave idea that simply didn’t work. The upside is that as failed race cars, the 121s didn’t get used up, just forgotten about until being rediscovered as collector cars. I think our subject car is the only one that got badly wrecked. We last saw it sell in 2017, when it made $5.7m at RM Sotheby’s Monterey. It has since been restored by Ferrari Classiche in Maranello, with attendant certification.

Gorgeous and notorious

So how should you approach a car like this as a collector? It’s a rare and special racing Ferrari with everything that implies — and it’s gorgeous. On the other hand, it’s not a V12 and it never even came close to winning anything in international racing. Maglioli took 3rd at the Mille Miglia in a sister car, but that was as a Type 118 and it still finished 45 minutes behind race-winner Stirling Moss in a 300SLR.

I have long argued that racing Ferraris are relatively valued based mostly on the number of cylinders they have, with an equivalent 12-cylinder (for instance, a 290 MM) being worth three times a 4-cylinder (an 860 Monza). If this holds, then a 121 should be worth a bit more than a 750 Monza but no more than a third of a 410 S, which is pretty much the same car with a V12 and a more-successful history.

Not enough of these cars sell in any year to establish a dependable market, but the last public sales are informative. We saw RM Sotheby’s sell a 750 Monza six years ago for $4m (SCM# 6846453) and a 410 Sport Spider last year at Monterey for $22m (SCM# 6954370). Using these as a reference, our subject 121 LM sold in the predicted range and in proper relation to the others. This car was thus fairly bought and sold, with a nod to the buyer given the freshness of its restoration. ♦

(Introductory description courtesy of RM Sotheby’s.)