Sir Lewis Hamilton has already won on the track with Ferrari – now he wants to win on the road.
The seven-time world champion has revealed his goal is to create his own Ferrari road car, which is inspired by his favourite model from the Italian brand, the F40 from 1987. The F40 was the last road car signed off by company founder, Enzo Ferrari, and is considered the benchmark for supercars of that era.
“One of the things I really want to do is, I want to design a Ferrari,” Hamilton told Motorsport. “I want to do an F44.”
He revealed more, including his preference for a manual transmission, something Ferrari stopped offering to customers en masse years ago.
“Baseline of an F40, with the actual stick shift,” said the 105-time grand prix winner. “That’s what I’m gonna work on for the next few years.”
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So is this a fantasy or something Ferrari would actually indulge? The truth is it’s actually a lot easier than you might think, at least if Hamilton only wants one example of the F44. Ferrari runs a ‘Special Projects’ department inside the company to develop bespoke supercars for its most important customers.
The division got a start when movie maker James Glickenhaus hired Pininfarina to redesign the bodywork of his Ferrari Enzo and created the P4/5. The first official car produced was the SP1 in 2008, a modified F430 for a Japanese businessman.
Special Projects customers are usually very wealthy clients, who tend to prefer privacy, but one well-known buyer is musician Eric Clapton, who turned a 458 Italia into the 512 BB-inspired ‘SP12 EC’. We’ve previously written about some of the more high-profile creations, such as the KC23, SP48 Unica and the Omologata.
Ferrari would undoubtedly accommodate Hamilton’s request for an F44 using the special projects team, even if sourcing a manual gearbox might be a challenge for the company that has proudly-used paddle-shift transmissions since it pioneered the technology in F1 in the late 1980s.
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An actual production run, on the other hand, might be more difficult, but judging by the impact his signing has had on the brand it’s not out of the question. As we reported at the time, Ferrari’s market capitalisation surged US$7 billion in the wake of Hamilton signing with the team – bringing two F1 icons together.
Ferrari’s Icona Series, a run of strictly limited special creations that Ferrari is offering to only its most loyal customers, which began with the Monza SP1 and SP2 in 2018 and includes the Daytona SP3. Ferrari launched the F1 and Le Mans Hypercar-inspired F80 in 2024 to a mixed reception, so perhaps a Hamilton-designed, F40-inspired special edition could be a sales hit for the Prancing Horse.
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