Somewhere in a garage sits one of roughly 90 Venturi 400 Trophies ever built, wearing its original Yacco livery and carrying decades of obscurity like a badge of honor. Animoya Garage is offering this French mid-engine race car for $385,000, and the listing comes with a pair of custom Yacco-themed Nike Dunks. Apparently that’s what passes for a signing bonus in the boutique supercar world.
The Venturi 400 Trophy ran a twin-turbo, 3.0-liter PRV V6 producing 408 horsepower and 390 lb-ft of torque, all sent to the rear wheels. The PRV — that joint venture engine shared across Peugeot, Renault, and Volvo — was an unlikely heart for a would-be supercar killer. Venturi made it work well enough to sustain a dedicated one-make racing series across French circuits for four seasons in the early 1990s.
This particular car was campaigned by Pierre Regnault during the 1992 and 1993 championship seasons. Unlike many of its siblings, which were eventually converted to road-legal duty after the series folded, this one stayed pure. It reportedly sat largely dormant until 2006, when its owner started wheeling it out for static displays.
About a decade ago, the car returned to active track duty at historic racing events. That revival required real mechanical attention, including a transmission rebuild. A more recent routine service was completed before the car hit the market.
For anyone of a certain age, the Venturi name triggers instant recognition not from any racetrack but from a PlayStation. The brand’s presence in Gran Turismo 2 and Sega’s Scud Race gave it a cultural footprint wildly disproportionate to its actual production numbers or commercial success. Venturi competed in serious GT racing globally through the mid-1990s, including a Le Mans effort in 1995, but its real legacy lives in the muscle memory of millions of thumbs.
The 1990s produced a strange ecosystem of boutique supercar brands — Cizeta, Vector, Isdera, Venturi — that burned bright and brief. Most collapsed under the weight of undercapitalization or ego. Venturi outlasted several of them, partly because it had the discipline to build an actual racing program rather than just concept cars and promises.
The one-make series gave the brand legitimacy that press releases alone never could, functioning like a budget version of the Porsche Carrera Cup model that still thrives today. At $385,000, this 400 Trophy occupies an interesting price bracket. It’s less than a well-optioned 992 Turbo S, yet it buys you a genuinely rare piece of French motorsport history with no modern equivalent.
The sneakers are a nice touch, though no photos of them have surfaced. In the Porsche world, matching your shoes to your car’s paint-to-sample color is a flex with an established market. Whether Venturi fandom runs deep enough to support the same ritual remains an open question.
Roughly 90 cars were made. The community probably fits in a restaurant.
Still, there’s something compelling about a race car that never got softened into a road car, that sat quietly for years and then found its way back onto a circuit. It didn’t get a restomod treatment or an LS swap. It’s just what it always was — a mid-engine French oddity with turbos and a livery that looks like it belongs on a memory card.
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