Another very famous unraced Ferrari is the 639, the first prototype designed by John Barnard for the Maranello Team.
It was hugely tested between July 1988 and June 1989.
It was equipped with the very first revolutionary semi automatic gearbox and you can clearly see that its concept hugely anticipated the definitive beautiful 640 (also known as F1/89) that raced the '89 season and won the first race in Brasil with Mansell, the Hungarian gp again with Mansell and the Portuguese gp with Gerhard Berger.
The 639 had been driven by testers Dario Benuzzi, Roberto Moreno, J.J. Lehto and the official drivers Mansell and Berger.
Among its feature, a 620hp V12 3,5 litres, while the front suspensions didn't have the torsion bars as the 640.
It didn't mounted rearview mirrors until it was brought in Estoril in December 1988 for an official FIA test session.
Between may and june 1989, J.J. Lehto also tested a special modified version of this 639 equipped with a 6 speed manual mechanical gearbox: the semiautomatic gearbox mounted on the 640 had terrible reliability problems and a part of the team, headed by Enzo Ferrari's son Piero Lardi, was against John Barnard (who in fact eventually left the team in July), and pushed to throw that innovation away trying to demonstrate that a mechanical gearbox would have been better. John Barnard was so convinced that his solution was the right one that he designed the 640 in a way that would have been virtually impossible to mount a gearbox command on the left of the driver inside the cockpit, so they had to use a 639 to try that experiment.
Considering how that technology spread both in car racing and on normal road cars... well we can really say mr. John Barnard was f***ing right and his perseverance changed car racing and car technology forever. What a genius!
