This 850-hp GT40 is bidding at $85,000. Its rebuilt title is part of why.

Good morning. In 1966, Ford spent a small fortune to beat Ferrari at Le Mans and finished first, second, and third. Superformance has been building licensed copies of that car in South Africa since the mid-2000s, and clean ones usually trade above $200,000. This afternoon, one with roughly twice the original's power closes, and it's bidding at $85,000.

A big part of the low price is paperwork: the car carries an Indiana rebuilt-vehicle title brand, meaning it was once declared salvage. That gives us a reason to look at what a branded title really costs, how the sequential gearbox inside the car works, and a quarter at GM where the company made more money and still got punished for it.

In today's newsletter, we'll get into:

Let’s roll.

Superformance builds the closest thing to a new GT40 you can buy, and this 2009 Mk II with 850 wheel horsepower is currently bidding at $85,000.

The cars are built in Gqeberha, South Africa, under license from Safir GT40 Spares, which holds the GT40 name. Each car gets an official GT40P continuation chassis number (this one is P/2176), and US cars are sold as rolling chassis with the engine and transaxle installed after purchase. That's how you end up with a drivetrain like this one:

Then there is the title. Indiana has branded it REBUILT VEHICLE, which under state law means it was once declared salvage, was repaired, and passed an inspection of its major parts. The brand isn't new. The car crossed a no-reserve sale in Scottsdale in early 2023 already described as prior salvage, and the listing doesn't say what the original damage was. Since the current owner bought it that year, the doors were repaired, the radiator and battery replaced, and earlier green sections painted over in silver and black.

As an engineer, the line I'd read twice is the horsepower. Earlier advertising for this chassis claimed 1,200 hp. The current dyno sheet says 850 at the wheels. A crank figure on aggressive boost can sit well above a wheel figure on a safer tune, since 10 to 15 percent disappears through the transaxle and tires. The dyno sheet is the only number with a measurement behind it, and I'd want to know what boost it was made on. One more detail for purists: the 1966 cars used the 427 FE big-block, while earlier descriptions of this car call its engine a 427 small-block, a different engine family that happens to share the displacement.

It closes this afternoon at 1:35 PM ET.

General Motors reported third-quarter results yesterday that beat almost every estimate. Revenue came in at $50.0 billion, up 2.9 percent. Adjusted operating profit rose 22 percent to $4.1 billion, an 8.2 percent margin. Adjusted earnings per share hit $3.70 against a $3.63 consensus. North America did the heavy lifting with an 8.7 percent margin, up 2.5 points, on a sales mix tilted toward full-size pickups.

GM also approved a $20 billion buyback and raised its cash flow forecast. The stock fell about 5 percent by mid-morning.

The reason sits in the cost line. GM's CFO told analysts that steel, aluminum, logistics, and chip costs rose sharply over the last two months, and GM now expects about $2 billion of commodity inflation this year, the high end of its earlier forecast. If prices stay where they are, the company says 2027 could take a similar hit. For comparison, GM expects its gross tariff bill for 2026 to land at the low end of $2.5 billion to $3.5 billion. The materials bill has quietly grown to the same order of magnitude as the trade fight everyone has been watching.

Why it matters:

Tesla reports after the close tonight, and Stellantis follows on October 28. Both will face the same steel and aluminum prices.

The GT40 above sends 850 wheel horsepower through a six-speed sequential transaxle. It shifts on a different principle than the manual in your daily driver, which explains why race cars use one and almost no road car does.

Start with your road car. Every gear in a conventional manual is always in mesh and spinning freely on its shaft. To select one, a sliding sleeve has to lock that gear to the shaft. Before it can, a synchronizer does the polite part of the job: a brass or carbon blocker ring presses against a cone on the gear, and friction brings the gear up or down to shaft speed. Until the speeds match, the blocker ring physically stops the sleeve from engaging. That friction step takes time, wears the rings, and is why a hurried shift grinds.

A sequential deletes the synchros. The gears are locked by dog rings: a handful of large, chunky teeth that drop into wide windows on the side of the gear. There is no speed matching. The dogs slam in. Fewer dogs means wider gaps and a better chance of catching engagement on a fast shift, at the cost of noise and a harsher clunk. The drive faces of the dogs are back-cut, angled so that torque pulls them deeper into engagement instead of pushing them out, which keeps the box from jumping out of gear under 746 lb-ft. Deleting the synchro hardware also frees space for wider, stronger gears.

The drum does the thinking. Instead of a shift gate, a sequential uses a rotating barrel with grooves machined into its surface. Each selector fork has a follower riding in one groove. Pull the lever (or, in this car, trigger the electric actuator) and a ratchet turns the drum exactly one step. The grooves move the right fork out and the next fork in. A spring-loaded detent drops into a notch to index each position. Because the groove pattern fixes the order, you can only go up or down one gear at a time. You cannot skip gears, and you cannot miss-shift from fourth into first.

The engine helps. On an upshift, the ECU briefly cuts ignition to unload the dogs so they slide out, then restores power once the next gear is engaged. Modern systems hold that cut until the box confirms the gear, not for a fixed time. On downshifts, the ECU blips the throttle to raise revs. Pneumatic paddle systems on race cars routinely complete clutchless shifts in 50 to 60 milliseconds.

Transaxle means everything is in one case. In a mid-engine car, the gearbox and differential share one housing bolted behind the engine. The original 1966 Mk II used a Kar Kraft-built four-speed, often called the T-44, because the 427's torque was more than the ZF five-speed in earlier GT40s was built for.

The twin-disc clutch is a packaging decision. Two friction discs give the same clamping capacity as one much larger disc. A smaller diameter means less rotating inertia, so the engine revs up and down faster between shifts. One common 9.7-inch twin-disc unit is rated around 850 lb-ft with organic linings.

So why not every car? Dog boxes clunk at parking-lot speeds, dislike gentle driving, and need their dogs inspected on a schedule measured in race hours. Road cars that tried automated single-clutch boxes, like the Lamborghini Aventador's seven-speed, could shift in about 50 milliseconds but lurched doing it. Dual-clutch transmissions won because they keep drive going through the shift.

The chain usually starts with an insurance claim. When repair costs pass a set share of a car's value, the insurer declares it a total loss, pays the owner, and the state issues a salvage title. That threshold varies by state, and many sit in the 70 to 80 percent range. Someone then buys the car, fixes it, and has it inspected. In Indiana, that means a state police check that verifies the major parts were legally sourced, plus a restorer's affidavit. Pass, and the car gets a REBUILT VEHICLE brand. That brand follows the car into every state it's ever registered in.

Three costs come with it:

Now apply it. If clean-title Superformance GT40s trade between $200,000 and $280,000, a standard 20 to 40 percent rebuilt discount puts this car somewhere between $120,000 and $224,000. It's bidding at $85,000, well below even the bottom of that range. The rest of the gap probably comes from the twin-turbo build, which thins out buyers who want a period-correct car, plus a damage history the listing doesn't explain.

One caveat for anyone tempted. On a hand-built fiberglass car, labor is high and panels are scarce, so the total-loss threshold can trip on damage that would be a routine repair on a mass-produced car. A brand here doesn't automatically mean structural trauma, but it puts most of the value story in the inspection report and repair records. Without them, price the car as if the worst happened.

That's a wrap. See you Friday — same inbox, lower gear.

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