The 10 Prettiest Race Cars That Completely Sucked On The Track

Photo: Pascal Rondeau (Getty Images)

We’ve acknowledged plenty of endurance racers in this list, but no assembly of the prettiest-but-slowest race cars would be complete without a contribution from Ferrari. Because even when a Ferrari completely biffs it on track, it tends to do so with grace.

Case in point: the F92A. Like all of Ferrari’s F1 machinery through the ’90s, it’s visually unassailable. Hell, it was even fast, in the off chance it could finish a race. Jean Alesi managed to do that in just six out of 16 chances in the 1992 season. On two of those occasions, he even took home third-place trophies.

Ferrari had a habit of attributing the F92A’s fickle nature to its innovative floor design. If you ask Alesi, that was merely a cover. “The engine suffered from blow-by, that is to say there was a leakage of oil from the piston rings in the combustion chamber,” the French driver told Motorsport.com in 2020.

“This caused 40-50bhp to be lost,” Alesi continued. “But in Ferrari tradition, it could not be said that it was the fault of the V12. Instead the fault was attributed to the car — which is a shame because the concept was interesting.”