Hamilton sold every car he owned, then bought a dusty Ferrari F40
In Baku last year, Hamilton said he had no cars left, and named one exception
Speaking before the 2025 Azerbaijan Grand Prix, Lewis Hamilton confirmed he had sold his entire collection. He was blunt about it: no cars, none left, art instead. Then he added a line almost nobody followed up on. If he ever bought one car again, it would be a Ferrari F40, and even then he described it as a beautiful piece of art rather than a machine. On Monday he posted photographs of his own.
The F40 sat in a garage for more than 30 years before Hamilton found it
Hamilton shared the car on Monday 31 August, and the post passed 1.000.000 likes inside a day. In his own words, he found it covered in dust after more than thirty years standing in a garage and knew he had to take it home. It went to Maranello first, where he says the factory's master engineers and mechanics worked for weeks to bring it back to life. He has promised to show what happened next, which suggests the restoration was filmed.
Ferrari Classiche was built to do exactly this job
The department Hamilton sent the car to has a name. Ferrari Classiche opened at Maranello in July 2006 to restore, maintain and authenticate older cars, and it issues a Certificate of Authenticity to road Ferraris more than twenty years old that still match their original homologation. That paperwork is not ceremonial. For a car that has not run since the 1990s, a factory recommissioning with Classiche documentation is the difference between an unknown history and a recorded one, and the market prices those two things very differently.
The F40 was the last Ferrari Enzo personally approved
Ferrari built 1,311 F40s between 1987 and 1992, against an initial plan for 400, and the car exists because the company turned forty in 1987. It was the last model Enzo Ferrari signed off before his death in 1988. The 2,936 cc twin-turbo V8 produces 478 hp, there is no power steering, no ABS and no traction control, early cars had sliding plexiglass windows and cord door pulls, and it was the first production car to break 322 km/h. Few objects are collected this hard at every price point.
Selling up runs in the Hamilton family
Lewis is not the only one who has cleared a garage. His father Anthony sent his own 27-car collection to auction in July, a very different set of cars and a very British one. What separates the two clear-outs is that Lewis kept a shortlist. He did not walk away from cars in 2025 so much as reduce the list to a single entry, then take a year to fill it.
An F40 stood behind Hamilton on his first day at Maranello
On 20 January 2025, his first day as a Ferrari driver, the official photograph placed Hamilton in front of Enzo Ferrari's old house at Fiorano with an F40 parked behind him. That car was not his. He says he made sure one was there because of what the model means to him, which makes the timing of this purchase read less like an impulse and more like a plan. He races at Monza this weekend in a car wearing a Schumacher tribute livery.
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The interesting part is what he did not buy. The median F40 auction result now sits around three million dollars, with half of all sales landing between 2.44 and 3.81 million. That is a serious amount of money and still nowhere near the ceiling for a seven-time world champion, and a car that has not turned a wheel since the 1990s sits below even that band, because reviving thirty-year-old fuel lines, rubber and a Kevlar body is an expensive problem. Hamilton bought the discount and handed the problem to Maranello.
So here is the test, and it is a clean one. He called the F40 a beautiful piece of art in Baku, and he has spent a year telling anyone who asked that he collects art now. If what follows is a studio shoot and a car under a cover, that is precisely what he has bought. If the promised footage ends with him driving it hard, on a road or at Fiorano, then the one car he came back for is being used as a car. An F40 gives a driver nothing to hide behind, which is the whole reason it is the one he named.
