Lando Norris's crashed Ferrari F40 is back on the road in London
The F40 Norris said was not back to normal in May 2025 is on London roads
Lando Norris has been filmed driving his Ferrari F40 through London this week, footage that surfaced on Instagram after his third place at the Madrid Grand Prix on 13 September. The car is the one a friend crashed on the roads above Monaco in January 2025, while Norris was away. He took delivery in the last quarter of 2024, and in May 2025 he said the repair was not finished.
The January 2025 crash: a friend, a left-hander above Monaco, and a damaged rear end
The video that circulated on 19 January 2025 showed the F40 losing its rear exiting a left-hand corner on a mountain road above Monaco and sliding into the guardrail, damaging the rear. Norris was not in the car; a friend he has never named was driving. Asked about it in Monaco in May 2025, he told The Sun the car was not back to normal, that it happened while he was away, and that he 'wasn't happy at all'. He has not said where the car was repaired or what it cost.
A 478 hp Ferrari F40 with no ABS is exactly the car friends crash
The F40 sends 478 hp from a 2,936 cc twin-turbo V8 to the rear wheels alone, through a five-speed manual, with no ABS, no traction control and no power steering, and the turbos arrive late and all at once. Ferrari built 1,311 of them between 1987 and 1992 against a plan for 400, the last model Enzo Ferrari signed off before his death in 1988, and claimed it as the first production car past 320 km/h. Cars leaving the road on a closing throttle are a recurring F40 story, which is why 'it was when I was away' is the detail Norris led with.
Hamilton's F40 went to Maranello; Norris's went back onto the road
Norris is now one of two Formula 1 champions with an F40 in 2026. Lewis Hamilton showed a barn-find F40 on 31 August, a car that had stood for more than thirty years before Ferrari's own engineers brought it back to life, and a year earlier he had told reporters in Baku that he owned no cars at all. The two cars sit at opposite ends of F40 ownership. Hamilton's is a factory recommissioning of a car that had barely moved; Norris's is a road-registered example that has been driven, crashed by someone else, repaired and driven again. Norris had his nearly two years before Hamilton found his.
The F40 market paid $8.4 million in August for a car with 72 miles on it
At RM Sotheby's Monterey sale on 13 to 15 August, a 1991 F40 ordered new by Lee Iacocca and sold on with 72 miles showing made $8,365,000, a record for a standard F40, in a sale that also saw a 1996 McLaren F1 GTR go for $34,655,000. In Monaco in May, a 1989 F40 with 1,799 km, dry stored for 29 years and recommissioned by Michelotto, sold for €4,336,250. The premium is for cars that have not been used. A driven F40 with a repaired rear end sits in a different bracket, closer to the roughly three million dollar median across all F40 sales, and that gap is the price Norris pays for treating his as a car.
Zak Brown's 2024 promise: a Pagani Zonda if Norris won the title
The F40 is not the car Norris calls his dream car. In a 2024 interview with The Telegraph he said he had a deal with McLaren chief executive Zak Brown: win the championship and Brown has to get him a car, one he described on Heart Radio as his dream car since childhood and 'not a McLaren'. He later confirmed it is a Pagani Zonda. Norris clinched the title in Abu Dhabi in December 2025, and neither he nor Brown has said publicly whether the Zonda has been delivered. Pagani ended regular Zonda production in 2011 and has kept building one-offs since; Fernando Alonso took delivery of a one-off Zonda Roadster Diamante Verde in May. Brown, meanwhile, has a champion driving a Ferrari through London.
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Norris is doing with his F40 the one thing the market punishes. The two headline results of 2026 went to cars with 72 miles and 1,799 km on them, and a car that has been crashed, repaired and driven through London traffic will never be catalogued that way. He bought it anyway, lent it anyway, and once it was fixed put it back on the road rather than under a cover. For a McLaren driver, whose team's own answer to the F40 made four times as much at the same Monterey sale, that is a clearer statement of taste than any garage list.
The open question is the Zonda. Brown made the promise in 2024, Norris collected on it in Abu Dhabi on 7 December 2025, and nine months later the only car anyone has filmed him in is the Ferrari. Pagani builds Zondas to order now, so a long wait is not proof of a broken promise. By the time the 2026 season ends in Abu Dhabi on 6 December, either a Zonda has turned up in the Norris garage, or Brown's deal was a line for a radio show and the F40 stays the champion's car by default.
