Ginetta G40

Among the 12 Ginetta Cars entries in the MotorJury library, the Ginetta G40 holds its own page in a catalogue built to record every car ever made, from series production to one-off concepts. The record places its introduction in 2008. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.

The era it was born into

To read the Ginetta G40 properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 2000s were the decade of electronics — stability control, dual-clutch gearboxes and the first serious hybrids arrived while platform-sharing consolidated the industry into a handful of giants. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the Nissan Nissan 370Z, the Tesla Tesla Roadster, the Volkswagen Volkswagen Tiguan — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Ginetta G40 reads like this: the record lists its engine as 2.0 L Mazda MZR I4 (road version) / 1.8 L Ford Zetec I4 (race version); kerb weight is recorded at 795 kg (road version) / 800-850 kg (race version); drive goes through Mazda 6-speed manual transmission / manual (road version) / 5-speed manual (early race versions) / Quaife 6-speed semi-automatic transmission / sequential manual (newer race versio; the layout is Front-engine, rear wheel drive. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.

Its place in the Ginetta Cars story

Within Ginetta Cars's own catalogue the Ginetta G40 sits alongside the Ginetta F400, the Ginetta G15, the Ginetta G32, the Ginetta G4. The record names the Ginetta G50 (road version) / Ginetta G20 (race version) as its predecessor and the class = Sports car (S) as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to sp = uk. Assembly is recorded at Leeds, West Yorkshire, England.

How this catalogue works

This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.

Why concepts and prototypes are in the library

Most car databases stop at series production. This one deliberately does not, because concept cars, racing specials and cancelled prototypes are where the industry thinks out loud — the ideas tested in public years before they reach a showroom. Holding them beside the production cars they inspired makes the lineage legible: nearly every landmark road car in this library has a concept ancestor somewhere in the catalogue, and the connections run through the era links on every page.

From catalogue to ownership

A specification sheet is only half a car's story. The other half — what breaks, what it costs to keep, which years to avoid — lives in MotorJury's ownership database, computed nightly from federal complaint and recall records and EPA economy data. Where the Ginetta G40 was sold in the United States, its model years carry full ownership verdicts there.