Lewis Hamilton’s Ferrari F40 Restoration Project

Lewis Hamilton has won just about everything there is to win in Formula 1, but his latest project has nothing to do with lap times, tyre strategies or world titles. It’s about a single car. One car he has loved since childhood.

An F40. His F40.

At Maranello, far from the glare of a Grand Prix weekend, Hamilton is working with Ferrari’s own engineers to restore what he calls “the car of my dreams” – a dusty, long-forgotten Ferrari F40 that spent more than three decades hidden away in a garage.

Only 1,311 F40s ever left the factory between 1987 and 1993.

The car is a landmark in Ferrari history: mid‑engined, rear‑wheel drive, engineered by Nicola Materazzi and styled by Pininfarina, a raw, uncompromising machine that still stops collectors in their tracks. A racing version followed from 1994 to 1996, but the road car has always held the aura. It’s the poster on the wall, the one that never fades.

Hamilton has never hidden what it means to him. Long before he wore red in Formula 1, he spoke about the F40 with the kind of reverence usually reserved for championship-winning cars. Now, as a seven-time world champion and a Scuderia Ferrari driver, he finally has one to call his own – and he’s gone straight to the source to bring it back to life.

When he arrived at Maranello for his first days as a Ferrari driver in 2025, cameras picked him out alongside an F40, the symbolism impossible to miss: the modern superstar next to the icon that helped shape his love of cars. Earlier this year, he was seen driving an F40 through the streets of Japan during the Japanese Grand Prix weekend, a throwback sight in a world of hybrid power units and efficiency targets.

This time it’s different. This time, it’s personal.

Hamilton revealed the project by sharing images of a dust‑covered F40, untouched for more than thirty years. The car looked frozen in time, a relic from another era. He explained that once he found it, abandoned but intact, there was only one place it could go: home to Maranello.

There, Ferrari’s master engineers and mechanics set to work. Weeks of painstaking restoration followed as they stripped away the years and revived the car beneath. No fanfare, no launch, just a world champion and a team of specialists quietly resurrecting a legend.

For Hamilton, who rarely spends his days cruising around in road cars anymore, the F40 sits in a different category entirely. It’s not a status symbol or a casual addition to an already impressive garage. It’s the childhood dream that survived the journey from kart tracks to world titles, now parked inside the very factory that created it.

He has thanked everyone involved in the project and made it clear this is only the beginning of the story. The car is alive again. The dust is gone.

Now the question is simple: when will we see Lewis Hamilton, in Ferrari red, unleashing his very own F40 on the open road?