Lewis Hamilton drove into the Monza paddock in a suit, tie and overcoat, stepped out of a Ferrari F40, and spent the next ten minutes answering questions about the car rather than the race. Given what the car turned out to be, that was probably the right order of priorities.
Hamilton has been calling the F40 his dream car for as long as anyone has thought to ask him about it. When he signed with Ferrari as a driver at the start of 2025, the first official photograph taken of him as a Ferrari driver had an F40 parked next to him. The search for the right one had been going on for years, and he was specific about what he wanted. Not a concours example from a rotating collection. Not something that had been repainted, modified or passed through several auction houses. He wanted a car with a real story and low mileage, one that still felt like what it was when it left the factory.
He eventually found a 1991 example whose original owner had collected it from Maranello, driven it the 69 kilometres home, put it in the garage, and by all accounts never really started it again. The passenger door had never been opened. The carbon fibre was in its original condition. The odometer showed delivery mileage. It had been sitting untouched for over 30 years.
Hamilton sent it straight back to Maranello. Ferrari’s own technicians spent weeks going through the car to get it back on the road, which by his account required less work than you’d expect from a car that hadn’t moved in three decades. Most things still worked. Very little had to be replaced. Then the mechanics pulled the engine.
Stamped into the engine block was the number 44. Hamilton’s race number. The one he’s carried through his entire Formula 1 career, the one that goes back to the number plate of the Vauxhall Cavalier his father Anthony drove him to karting events in as a kid. It had been on the car since it left the factory in 1991, two decades before Hamilton would adopt it as his own.
“I couldn’t believe it,” he said at Monza. “I was like, did you know? You’ve got to be lying.”
He drove it to the Italian Grand Prix. The front plate read 44. He got out in front of the Ferrari home crowd, at the circuit named after Enzo Ferrari’s son, in the car the last Ferrari Enzo himself personally signed off before his death in 1988, wearing a number that had been sitting in the engine the whole time.
The F40 was Ferrari’s last road car built under Enzo Ferrari’s direct instruction. He died four months after production began. Just over 1,300 were made between 1987 and 1992, originally priced at around $400,000 USD, now trading on the secondary market at anywhere from $2 million to $4 million depending on provenance and condition. Hamilton’s, with its original paint, delivery mileage and the engine number that nobody planned, sits in a category of its own. He said he wants to drive it. He already has.