Lewis Hamilton has finally got the one car he could not talk himself out of. The seven-time world champion has revealed that he has bought and restored a Ferrari F40, a year after selling off an entire supercar collection and admitting there was only one machine that could tempt him back.
Hamilton announced the project on Monday 31 August, sharing images of the car mid-restoration — engine out, bodywork stripped — in a post that had gathered more than 278,000 likes within hours.
The Lewis Hamilton Ferrari F40 he waited a lifetime for
“My very own F40. This is the car of my dreams and has been for as long as I can remember,” Hamilton wrote. “As a kid I dreamt of having one. When I joined Ferrari last year I made sure to have one with me on my first day at Maranello. That’s how much it means to me.”
The car itself, by his account, was not exactly showroom fresh. “These cars are works of art and incredibly rare, so when I found this one, covered in dust after being sat in a garage for over thirty years, I knew I had to bring her home,” he said, as reported by Motorsport.com.
“First to Maranello, where the master engineers and mechanics at the factory worked for weeks to bring her back to life. Massive thank you to everyone who had a hand in this project. This has truly been a dream come true.”
A behind-the-scenes film appears to be coming, with Hamilton teasing: “I can’t wait to share more with you all. Stay tuned…”
The collection he sold — and the one exception
What gives the story its edge is that Hamilton spent 2025 doing the opposite. Speaking ahead of that year’s Azerbaijan Grand Prix, he confirmed he had cleared out a garage understood to have included a Pagani Zonda 760 LH, a Mercedes-AMG Project One, a Ferrari LaFerrari and a 1966 Shelby Cobra 427.
“I don’t have any cars anymore,” he said at the time. “I don’t have any cars, so I got rid of all my cars. I’m more into art nowadays. If I was going to get a car, it would be the F40. But that’s a nice piece of art.”
Twelve months on, the caveat has become a purchase. It is a neat piece of consistency from a driver whose move to Maranello was itself framed as a childhood ambition rather than a career calculation.
Why the F40 still carries that weight
Launched in 1987 to mark Ferrari’s 40th anniversary, the F40 was the last road car signed off by Enzo Ferrari before his death, and it remains the purist’s choice among modern Ferraris: a twin-turbocharged V8, and a cabin stripped back to bare composite with cord pulls in place of door handles. Just over 1,300 were built, and values have climbed steadily as surviving cars have been hoarded rather than driven — which is precisely how Hamilton’s ended up under three decades of dust.
A well-timed reminder of why he is in red
The timing is not accidental. Hamilton, now 41 and in his second season with Ferrari, heads to Monza this weekend for the Italian Grand Prix with the Scuderia still chasing Mercedes in a championship led by Kimi Antonelli, who holds a 59-point advantage over Hamilton and Mercedes driver George Russell.
It has not been a straightforward campaign. The Dutch Grand Prix produced an uncomfortable team-orders row alongside Charles Leclerc, and Ferrari arrives at its home race under the usual weight of expectation, complete with a Schumacher tribute livery for the occasion.
Against that backdrop, a restored F40 rolling back out of the factory gates is the sort of story the tifosi will take gladly. Whether it buys Hamilton any goodwill on Sunday afternoon is another matter entirely.
