There hasn’t been a new Ferrari road car built in at least a decade that’s worth caring about, but the company’s newest hire wants to change that. Seven-time F1 world champion Lewis Hamilton joined Scuderia Ferrari for the 2025 season, and he’s already looking to make the race team’s parent company better. Saturday’s sprint race winner and Sunday’s Grand Prix disqualified suggested to Motorsport that he’d like to design his own Ferrari supercar, and based on his suggestions, it would be a real banger. The brand’s iconic 1980s hypercar, the twin-turbocharged V8 carbon-fiber monster F40, is Hamilton’s baseline from which to build. He hopes to call the car F44, in a nod to his long-serving F1 race number. It’s stuff like this that makes Hamilton the G.O.A.T. beyond any shadow of a doubt.
Hamilton entered his tenure at Ferrari with an iconic photo outside Enzo Ferrari’s home standing next to the legendary F40, perhaps already setting his plan into motion. “Baseline of an F40, with the actual stick shift. That’s what I’m gonna work on for the next few years,” said Hamilton. Ferrari has not produced a car with a manual transmission since the California in 2012, and hasn’t build a good car with a manual transmission since the F430 ended production in 2009. It wouldn’t be impossible for Ferrari to produce a manual again, or simply crib one from Tremec, and the demand for a low-volume manual hypercar would certainly exceed supply. My prediction is that such a car, were it built, would be an instant classic collectible.
What’s an F40, again? Asking for a friend
Built between 1987 and 1992 the Ferrari F40 will probably always be the car Maranello is most and best known for. While just 1,315 cars were built originally, the car was built to satisfy the FIA Group B racing homologation and compete on even footing with Porsche’s 959, but didn’t make production by the time Group B was deleted. There was no point in throwing away the engineering behind the Group B race car, in spite of there being nowhere to race the thing, so the engineers did the bare minimum to turn the race car into a road car and sell them to the public. A high-revving 2.9-liter V8 with a pair of turbos and a pair of intercoolers, the 3,000-ish-pound car was more than quick enough with 471 horsepower on tap. If Lewis Hamilton could get Ferrari to produce a mostly analog car with a weight even close to 3,000 pounds in the next five years with three pedals and a shift-it-yourself gearbox, I’d be willing to declare him the greatest human being on the planet in perpetuity.
Forget the F1 World Championship, this should be Ferrari’s number one priority.
